Tag: Mindy Greenstein PhD

What Not to Say to a Cancer Patient

If you read my last cancer blog, “What Do I Say When Someone I Care About Gets Cancer,” you probably know that I won’t actually tell you what not to say to a cancer patient. That’s because words without context are meaningless. “You’ll be fine” may feel heartening one day, and dismissive another. For me,…

What Do I Say When Someone I Care About Gets Cancer?

My father’s best friend, Mendl, whose name was very close to my Hebrew name, Mindl, died of cancer when he was fifty. I was eight. There had been lots of illnesses before, but cancer was a whole new ballgame when it came to sickness. The word itself seemed to strike terror in the grownups as…