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It’s imperative that whoever answers, knows how to listen. Students from the University of California at Berkeley sometimes intern at WCRC to earn credit toward their degrees. WCRC Program Director Dolores Moorehead trains them to answer the phones. “A lot of them are very concerned about saying the wrong thing. And my feeling is that you can’t say the wrong thing,” Moorehead explained to me. She said people sometimes say less-than-ideal things because they become uncomfortable with silence. ” Moorehead advises her interns, “You listen to the person; you allow them to have their silence.

It was the rst time in my life that I had really thought about my own mortality. , prostate cancer survivor When I rst heard this tall, slender woman with a slight German accent on The Group Room, a nationally syndicated radio show for people with cancer, I was immediately struck by not only her intelligence but also her deep compassion. “We have to have a special tolerance and understanding of anyone who has su ered a loss,” she said, “because the imperative to tell the story is their survival, is their healing, and that’s why I believe in grief work and grief counseling.

But really it just makes it worse for them, not the sick person. ” His face turned serious as he continued. ” How to be there without being there Being there need not necessitate face-to-face or even voice-to-voice contact, and often the patient may reject such contact, but still need and appreciate support. Such was the case with Ancil, a retired executive who volunteered as a patient administrator for a health-care institution. When he was diagnosed with tonsil cancer, he was treated with both radiation and chemo in the hospital where he worked.