Worrying About Our Health When a Loved One is Ill—Normal or Not?
I was trying to get some work done at my desk when the phone rang. It was January of 2007 and caller ID showed that my Dad was calling. It wasn’t Thursday, his usual day to phone me, so I knew before answering that something was up.
Sure enough, after a few minutes of chit chat, my then 78-year-old Dad tried to make light of a serious situation. “Well,” he said, “I’m afraid that when you go in to your doctor’s office and fill out forms saying what diseases your relatives have, you’ll have to add cancer to the list.”
What? Was my Dad trying to tell me that he had cancer?
Unfortunately, he was. He had just come from the doctor’s office, he said, where he was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. He didn’t know all of the details of his treatment yet, but he assured me it probably meant just getting the small tumors removed. He sounded positive and upbeat about his condition, and after a few more minutes on the phone we hung up and I tried to get back to work as if everything was okay.
But as I shared my father’s news with my closest friends and family members that week, I found myself experiencing an interesting phenomenon.
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