Talking about your condition

It can be very difficult to acknowledge that you have a serious illness. It is natural for anyone who has recently been told this news to feel overwhelmed by their emotional reactions. It can also be very difficult to deal with other people’s emotions and reactions to your situation.

Some people can’t cope with their own emotions and may tend to avoid the difficult situation altogether. So your friends might prefer to stay away from you, rather than accept that they have strong emotions that they cannot deal with. Here are some tips for dealing with this situation:

• Always try to respond to your relative or friend’s feelings. If you are good at guessing how people feel, it can be helpful to identify your friend’s emotion and what caused it. This can be quite simple, such as ‘When I talk about my illness you look really upset’ or ‘It looks as though you get very scared when you come here.’
• Don’t be afraid to say how you feel at the same time: ‘I think both of us are finding this awful.’ Or ‘I know you’re worried about what could happen and so am I.’ The more aware you both are of each other's feelings, the better the communication will be.
• If you get into some type of argument (which is not unusual) see the section ‘Hints for resolving conflict'

Effects on sex and relationships

If the person you are talking to is your spouse or sexual partner, don’t ignore the subject of sex. If you had an active sex life before the illness, it will probably be affected by the diagnosis. Many factors affect this: fear of the illness and of the treatment, resentment about the illness, change in physical appearance, embarrassment and so on.

If you relationship itself is affected by your illness, it can be helpful to discuss this with those involved in your care. Our section on Sexuality may also be helpful.

Talking to healthcare staff

Most conversations between you and your doctors or nurses will probably go smoothly. However, it is not unusual for people to sometimes feel that they are not getting the information or support that they need. Here are some tips to help you:

• Ask doctors or nurses to use simple language and explain any medical terms. If your healthcare team use words that you do not understand, you can ask them to explain them. Sometimes they forget that you are not as familiar with medical jargon as they are.
• Use your own language. Although your doctors or nurses may use medical jargon, you do not have to. There is nothing wrong with using your own words to describe the problem. In fact, using jargon that you only partly understand might cause problems by making the health professionals think that you know more than you do.
• When you’re embarrassed, don’t hesitate to say so! We all find certain kinds of medical symptoms and problems embarrassing – they’re very often the kind of personal matter we don’t talk about to someone else. So when you start talking about something that is embarrassing, you can just say something like ‘I’m sorry ... this is embarrassing to talk about, but...’