Typhoid Mary

We have all had the uncomfortable experience of being around someone who has been diagnosed with cancer or who has a loved one diagnosed with cancer. We don't know what to say. We don't know how to act. We don't want to ignore it, but we don't want to acknowledge it either.

When otherwise healthy people are around those of us with chronic illnesses, it's not much different. You see, we are a walking, breathing reminder that it can happen to them to. In fact, more than one in three Americans has a chronic illness.

In order to make sense of this, healthy people try to figure out why we are sick and they are not. They are looking for a way to convince themselves that they are going to be OK. They are looking for something in us that they can blame for our condition.

As I was wheeled into the emergency room with congestive heart failure brought on my lupus, my friend said, "If only you stopped smoking you would not be here now." Recently, a lupus patient shared the fact that her brother blames her lupus on her weight. (Of course the steroids used to treat the lupus might just have something to do with that!)

In these situations, it is helpful for us to take a step back and put things in perspective. What these people say sounds terribly judgemental. When we hear it, we are angry and defensive. But if we realize that this kind of blaming is how they make sense out of what happened to us and that they are desperately trying to reassure themselves that they won't suffer the same fate, we can choose a different reaction.