Your Friendships Change Forever When You Get Cancer

A diagnosis alters your life in so many ways not least your friendships.

- Deborah James

THERE ARE A few moments in your life when you truly make friends. Proper friends. The kind who wipe your tears when that bad boy really turns out bad, or hold your hair back over a bowl, rub your back and tell you everything will be fine. Or the kind who come to chemotherapy with you, cry and laugh when you don’t know if you’ll be alive next year and joke about what they might wear to your funeral if you don’t make it through. When I look at my wonderfully eclectic mix of friends, it’s predictably the milestones – school, college, university, work, babies, cancer – that acted as a catalyst for forming my incredible support network. A network that since my diagnosis 22 months ago – with stage 4 bowel cancer – I have leaned on heavily, just to function.

I will never forget one of my friends bluntly telling me to get up, get in the shower and get dressed as I lay in bed with deep depression, unable to put one foot in front of the other after hearing the words, ‘You have cancer.’ But while I wouldn’t be standing, let alone still smiling, today without my friends, I have to be honest and admit that since cancer entered my life, every one of my relationships has changed, some for the better, others less so.