The Yelp Lady’s Guide to Beating Cancer
This holiday season, starting with Thanksgiving, is a good time to be grateful for a healthy body and stable mind. If that healthy gratitude baseline is denied you or yours in 2011, you can still give some small grimace of thanks—because Rebecca Pederson has posted “Tips on Surviving Your Cancer” on the Hairpin.
Pederson lives in San Francisco, is an editor at Yelp and—to judge by her prose—is brave, self-deprecating and eminently practical.
The only thing more exhausting than chemo is having a face-to-face conversation with everyone you've ever met about your battle of wills with a murderous tumor.
Her bullshit-free, real-life tips may be a tad indelicate for fragile sensibilities. But go ahead and chance it:
The only thing more exhausting than chemo is having a face-to-face conversation with everyone you've ever met about your battle of wills with a murderous tumor. So after you tell the important people in your life, make a public [Facebook] announcement. Otherwise, a lot of your casual acquaintances will bully you into long conversations because they want to be personally affected by your disease. These are usually the types who tell elaborate stories about their bad days; meeting a cancer patient is like meeting a celebrity to them. Nonchalantly noting the state of your health online helps deflate and deflect these sympathy vultures.
Take a moment and bookmark the full dose of Rebecca Pederson’s trenchant and hard-earned wisdom. Let’s hope, God forbid, that it never comes in handy.
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