When Life Becomes Precious: The Essential Guide for Patients, Loved Ones, and Friends of Those Facing Serious Illnesses - Softcover

Babcock, Elise NeeDell

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553378694 ISBN 13: 9780553378696

Publisher: Bantam, 1997

Synopsis

When you hear that someone you love has cancer...
You want to be as supportive as possible. But how?

Elise NeeDell Babcock has devoted her life to answering this question and now puts her twenty-three years of experience as a counselor into this immensely useful guide. When Life Becomes Precious contains hundreds of tips for helping patients, primary caregivers, co-workers, and family members, including:

What to say (and not to say) to someone when you first find out they have cancer
· How to be supportive without being intrusive
· How to build a winning health-care team
· How to handle holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries
· How to explain the disease to children
· Which gifts and gestures can do the most good

From techniques for handling anger and anxiety, to uplifting success stories, to a comprehensive resource section, here is the information and inspiration you need to help those you love and to make each day--each moment--more precious.

When Life Becomes Precious will be the first book to:
· Offer tips on ways to help patients, caregivers and co-workers
· Provide a long and diverse list of gifts that are appropriate to give to families that are living with cancer
· Offers reasons why fear makes people shy away from discussing cancer and techniques on how to overcome that fear
· Present the things that families do that doctors like and dislike

When Life Becomes Precious will teach readers to assess and put into perspective, their own feelings about the disease so that they can truly help those who are afflicted with it. The use of cartoons, anecdotes and personal stories will set an upbeat and positive tone. Readers will come away fully prepared to deal with the realities of cancer.

About this title

Review:

When someone you care about is diagnosed with cancer, what should you say? What should you not say? What are the best ways to offer help, or to help children understand what is happening? When Life Becomes Precious is an outstanding resource for answers to such uncomfortable questions. It includes specific tips for cultivating a support network, avoiding caregiver burnout, managing fear and anger (in both yourself and the cancer patient), finding the best doctors and other health care professionals to plan treatment, preparing for hospital visits, and, for the patient, dealing with cancer when at the workplace.

Written with tact and warmth, this book is filled with advice that's likely to escape your mind during this time of stress, from 14 questions to ask before surgery to the medical and legal documents to have handy at all times to 8 reasons for switching doctors. Babcock, who has 23 years of counseling experience, also offers guidance for what to do when the cancer patient refuses all medical care: "Someone who refuses treatment and understands the repercussions of his decision is not in denial," she says. "You will have to learn to respect and accept his choice, however, even though you disagree. No other stance will support him, even though you think it will."

Babcock also includes empathetic ways to discuss mortality, and tactics for making it through holidays and birthdays, along with contact information for more than 100 resources such as support organizations and networks, chronic pain centers, hospices, and newsletters and magazines. --Erica Jorgensen

From the Back Cover:

"When Life Becomes Precious is both practical and powerful; a sensitive, informative handbook and an inspiring guide to helping others who have cancer. I cannot recommend this book highly enough."
--Jack Canfield, co-author of Chicken Soup for the Surviving Soul

"An indispensable guide for the people most often forgotten when cancer strikes: the spouse, caregivers, and friends of the patient."
--Michael Korda, author of Man to Man: Surviving Prostate Cancer

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0553378694
• ISBN 13: 9780553378696
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 304