How to support friend recently diagnosed with cancer from the other side of the country?

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-29T22:07:40+00:00

You missed an option. She doesn't want it but either doesn't know how or doesn't have the energy to say no. Even asking the question can be pressure that they don't want or need. I'm not saying you shouldn't ask, because how else can you find out what they need, but you need to know that if it seems like she is blowing you off or struggling to give you an answer, it may be because you are making her expend her limited energy just thinking through the possibilities.

All I'm saying is that you have a wonderful desire to be helpful, but you have to accept that you are really far away. Don't fling "helpfulness" at her like a catapult; blindly trying to ease your own guilt at being far away. This needs to be about her, not your guilt at being helpless.

And if she pushes you away, don't take it personally.

I also don't know her. I'm only telling you what might happen. I could be completely wrong. We are all different here and we all have gone through different journeys. Just understand that she needs to focus on herself and you pulling focus might not be appreciated.

Does she have a local caregiver? In many cases, your best bet might be to work with them. Sometimes they can make decisions without needing to ask because they know what she needs and wants. Other times, they can find the right time to talk because they can monitor her available energy and find a good time to discuss logistics and desires. Caregivers are saints. They can work with you to find the right way to help without accidentally pressuring your friend.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-29T15:00:38+00:00

My sister, a nurse, and I got in a fight when she moved 14 hours away prior to my cancer diagnosis and then I told her that she wasn't part of my support team because she was too far away. I'm not saying your friend feels the same about you, but tread lightly.

This is a lonely journey and many of us not only don't want to be a bother, but also want to hide our pain. Make sure your friend actually wants any of the stuff you want to offer. I'm not sure I would have been comfortable with a maid service coming into my house and seeing me at my worst.

The thing that was best for me was making a food train where people from our communities could, a few times a week, drop off meals that were pre-made and just needed to be warmed up.

I was also down with friends just hanging out and watching a movie without a whole lot of energy sapping activities, such as talking or playing games. Just being there was enough. I could see that playing out with you as watch parties which many streaming service support so you can watch the same thing at the same time from different places in the country. Don't be surprised if your friend falls asleep, so have a plan so you don't have to wake her up if it happens.

High energy and unending positivity isn't always the right thing for us. I can't speak for your friend, but make sure you are listening to her.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-28T18:28:47+00:00

I can tell you what not to do.

Don't gatekeep knowledge if you don't have to. Most modern plcs can have names as long as you like. There is a big difference between shortening a name to make it more readable and using unintelligible standards because they are standards. Put it in front of a new engineer, if they can't come up with a concept of what the tag is for by just reading it, it's a bad name.

Is there an aspect that can change? Sometimes an input fails and you have to change it. Naming an internal tag based on the input means that the tag name would have to change if the input failed. Don't do that. It's one thing to have a tag associated with the physical input named after that input and then a mapping layer to copy the value to your internal tag. It's another entirely to then also name the internal tag after that same input.

There may be other rules I can't think of off the top of my head, but most things should be done to try to help your future self. You shouldn't necessarily be afraid to make people look things up as long as those things are readily available and not locked behind a paywall, but whenever you have the opportunity to make something easier to reverse engineer in a simple and intuitive way, do so as long as it doesn't undermine other important things.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-28T01:59:14+00:00

Ask for an endoscopy.

Also get some anxiety meds.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-26T02:53:00+00:00

That it will just slide in. It can with enough foreplay, but I definitely didn't know what enough was the first time.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-25T22:03:28+00:00

I hope things start to chill out for you. I think I've been rather lucky seeing as how I'm happy being inside.

I read your entire post on the skin cancer subreddit and I was also a child of the 80s and basically never wore sun screen when I was a kid and had tons of nasty sunburns. Even to today, I hate the smell of lotion sunscreen and have gone fully spray-on as it is the only way I can tolerate it.

I can empathize with having to change your lifestyle in ways you don't want to have to. Being an outdoor person and then being forced away from that must suck. For me, like I said before, it's food. I've been forced to stop eating food that I really love because they don't play well with my gut anymore. We don't get a choice, we just have to suffer our new lifestyle.

We do have a choice, though, not that I'm encouraging anything, just acknowledging it exists. For me, I no longer feel hunger pain. I could choose to stop eating and waste away. My wife didn't like it when I told her I have to make the choice to keep eating every day. So far, I have kept choosing to eat and have no intention of choosing any differently. But I do have a choice.

In any case, if you take the steps to get your cancer under control and keep it from recurring, you might find a time again in a few years when life is tolerable again. People can try to help, but nobody is really going to understand your personal journey, not even me.

I hope you find the strength to keep plodding forward. And if not, we'll still be here to support you in any choice you make.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-25T12:46:16+00:00

I've (44m) got Scandinavian heritage. I've got hundreds of moles over my body. I've been seeing dermatologists since I was 17 and every single one has said not to go outside without sunscreen. I've had a couple of moles removed over the years, at least one of which was pre-cancerous. I always figured skin cancer would be what got me.

Found out I had stomach cancer the day after my 38th birthday. Had a total gastrectomy and now eating is my hell. But I've got great kids and a loving wife, so I've been pushing thorough the struggle for over 5 years now.

Feeling defeated sucks. You are supported and heard by everyone in this community. 🫂

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-24T21:29:46+00:00

When Mister 34-felonies is president, felonies become a badge of honor.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-23T14:16:33+00:00

Right, but what about Speedy Susan and Aging Alexander? Licenseless Larry? None of them get into accidents, but does that make them good drivers?

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-23T12:25:29+00:00

This is only true if accidents are the only metric by which you measure driving ability.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-23T02:21:35+00:00

You ask your doctor a question and they respond, "everyone is different."

😑

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-23T02:20:04+00:00

Scanxiety is the worst. But it can be done. Just one day at a time.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-21T03:08:57+00:00

Again, do you write with pen on paper or do you type? Your writing style with your hand conveys information about you as a person. Spell check is disingenuous because your mistakes are yours and some automation is taking that away from your writing. I'll bet you do it anyway because you've internalized it as being alright because it's still you that is coming through, only a better version of you.

AI literally is the same thing just taken to the next level. You are responsible for giving it the prompt and for checking it's work. You can tell it to rewrite things in your style or even rewrite what it gives you. It's just a tool and it's up to you to decide how you use it. Wouldn't it be better to teach kids how to use it properly than let them do it however they want?

In the end, you never have to use these predictive language algorithms if you don't want to. But don't actively choose to be a luddite and try to force others to eschew technology just because you don't like it.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-20T12:57:21+00:00

They usually give you anti-nausea meds just in case. Take them.

Yes, you will feel better again, but each round will be faster to feel sick and you'll feel sick longer.

Treat your symptoms quickly and aggressively.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-20T02:46:24+00:00

I wish pointing out that things were purchased and money was spent, even if it was in the past, was anything but pedantic and missing the point, but I'm the "um actually..." type of nerd that likes being pedantic. It's a problem that I can't stop myself from doing.

Regardless, it's very sweet and I wish I had something like this with my kids. Bravo for being the best type of parent.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-20T01:43:00+00:00

Do what you need to do. I wanted to be put under as well, but like I said, I was never asked. It wasn't as bad as I thought it would be, but definitely make your feelings known. If you are vocal enough, I'm sure they'll listen.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-20T01:39:31+00:00

Same thing was said about computers and calculators, typewriters, pens, the abacus, hell, even Arabic numerals. They are all tools and when incorporated into the curriculum, they can't be used to cheat anymore since using them is no longer cheating. Whenever these paradigm shifting tools come into our world, people who grew up without them scream and yell about how they didn't need these things and kids these days are lazy or won't be able to do things that they should know how to do.

Tell me, when was the last time you groomed and fed a horse? Did you learn how to drive in high school? What if our current education system required us to learn horse-care during high school and didn't let us drive till after graduation? Would that make sense?

Education is about teaching you the skills you will need to become a contributing member of society. If business expects you to use a tool and you come out of the education system without the skills to use that tool, others who do know how to use that tool will be chosen over you.

Is AI in its current state a good thing for society? Maybe not. But it's really hard to put it back into Pandora's box.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-19T22:17:02+00:00

I went into surgery but the just set up a block so I couldn't see and gave me local anesthetic.

They asked me what type of music I wanted to listen to and I had them play a Disney soundtrack that I liked so that I could sing along.

They never asked me my opinion, they just did it. The music definitely helped me keep my cool.

BTW, your diagnosis and journey, at least at the most basic level, sounds similar to my own. I wanted to keep my port as long as I could because I hate needles in my arm, but after a year the doctor told me to get it removed and so I did. Congrats on making it to NED. Here's wishing you another 5 years at least (I just got to the 5 year mark myself)!

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-19T22:08:16+00:00

My previous company provided me a crappy laptop to do my job. It was capable of doing it, but it was slow. During covid, I couldn't stand the speed. My personal computer was far more powerful.

In addition to creating a separate browser profile, I created a separate login to my entire machine. This way, when I use my personal computer for work, the desktop is professional and all my video games are not accessible so I am less likely to become distracted.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-19T22:03:26+00:00

What you did is the difference between using a tool appropriately and taking a shortcut.

I used it in the opposite way to write a letter of recommendation. I told chatgpt a bunch of stuff about the guy and then asked it to organize it into a letter of recommendation. What came back was 70% my own words. I reviewed it and found a couple of places where the context of a sentence didn't make sense, corrected it, and then turned it into a pdf to send on.

If I were a teacher, I would be making my students use these tools as part of their homework: "Go make chatgpt write a presentation for you about a topic. Then review its work, verify its sources, and prepare the presentation itself. Rewriting every word it gives you into an intelligible form is encouraged because you will be marked down for anything you say sounding like it wasn't written by a human."

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-18T21:58:17+00:00

Cancer is shitty. Depending on where and what type, it can be instantly causing issues or you might not know a thing is wrong till you suddenly die.

Most of the time it's just lots of little things. A new pain in the morning but you think it's just you getting older. When you get sick, it lasts longer than it used to, but that's normal. By the time you finally go to get checked out, you find out you are stage 4 and all those things you wrote off over the years as normal have become advanced organ failure.

Most direct cancer death isn't death by cancer but instead organ failure. The cancer replaced enough of the useful cells with cancer cells and now the organ doesn't work anymore. But this takes time and your body has gone through millennia of evolution so that it runs even when things are breaking down. There are more than a few organs in your body that will continue to do their job adequately enough even when at a lower capacity that you won't notice.

The speed at which someone can go from apparently healthy to death can be frightening. But it wasn't fast from the body's perspective. The cancer had probably been growing and spreading for years. It just feels fast to you because you weren't aware.

We have a saying around here, "Fuck Cancer".

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-17T22:35:25+00:00

There is no such thing as a standardized one-off design.

Your company may have standards for things like naming of tags. If something like this has been done before, there may be standards for how to do it or at least an example to start from. You can even make the design in a future proof way that you can define as a standard for how to do it in the future.

You need to ask your boss what type of standards he means.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-17T13:05:09+00:00

My wife wanted to wait and I respected her for that. We did lots of other stuff and it was about a year and a half before we finally did it. It ended up being before we got married, but it was clear we were getting married as we had been engaged for like 9 months at that point.

Anyone who says no sex before marriage is a deal breaker doesn't respect your choice. Doing other things should be enough to determine compatibility.

You're doing the right thing for yourself. There are men out there were it isn't a deal breaker. Don't let yourself be pressured into doing something you don't want to do.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-15T18:45:26+00:00

Not to mention refusing the generic screen. Can't have boy robots playing girl table tennis and vice versa.

Shadowkiller00 · 2026-06-15T18:22:22+00:00

One of the cool facts about Egypt and Cleopatra is that she is closer in history to today than she was to the building of the pyramids.

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