Friday, August 15, 2008

You Could Get Diabetes From Cancer

You could get diabetes from being around the people who are around the people with cancer. Enough nice already. Nice is dissociative. Nice is distancing. Nice is disrespectful of the reality of what difficulty people with cancer are facing. Nice becomes condescending in two breaths. Skip the Waverly fabrics and give me exposed brick and straight talk. Skip the euphemisms. At The Amy Winehouse House we have former Marine drill instructors as our support group facilitators. They do not say, “How are you feeling today?”. Our guys say, “Hey, Get the F up and deal with it.. This is the place to learn to roll your own”. And in our program for kids: We give them a real opportunity to be helpful. We ask teenagers to come help the people with cancer learn to roll a joint with one hand so they can do it during chemo.

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