Facing Cancer: Getting Help In Tough Times

Here’s a tough subject, a malady that affects virtually all of us in one way or another. It may seem an odd topic for your friendly local magazine to cover. However, it’s a reality, and thanks to Port Ludlow resident Lisa Coutu, there is now a host of information available to help deal with the dreaded big C for yourself or for whomever might need a helping hand.

Coutu’s recently released a book – Communicating Cancer–Strategies for You, Family and Friends – offers an intriguing mix of advice, encouragement, empowerment tactics, and more to help deal with the subject.

As a cancer survivor herself, with a PhD in the Ethnography of Communication, and a position as a Teaching Professor Emeritus in Communication at the University of Washington in Seattle, Coutu is uniquely qualified to write this book. And she does so with clarity, understanding, and a strong focus on specific strategies designed to help cancer patients, their families, and their friends cope with the disease and all its ramifications.

The book tackles everything from first diagnosis, to learning to communicate about it with family and friends, the ins and outs of navigating an increasingly complex health care system, and what it feels like to come out on the other side of the cancer maze. And yes, it really does take more than a heartfelt, “Hurrah!”

The book also includes selections from a notebook written by Coutu as she went through the process from start to finish. It has notes on what, whom, and how to tell about a diagnosis; communication strategies for working with health care providers; plus extensive areas for a reader to jot down their own notes on things they want to remember, or tell, or just plain process.

For those interested, the self-published book can be ordered in print from the Communicating Cancer website (https://www.communicatingcancer.com/) and is also available, either online or in print, from a host of retailers including Apple, Amazon, and Barnes and Noble.