When Life Becomes Precious: The Essential Guide for Patients, Loved Ones, and Friends of Those Facing Serious Illnesses

When you hear that someone you love has cancer...
You want to be as supportive as possible. But how?

Elise NeeDell Babcock has devoted her life to answering this question and now puts her twenty-three years of experience as a counselor into this immensely useful guide. When Life Becomes Precious contains hundreds of tips for helping patients, primary caregivers, co-workers, and family members, including:

What to say (and not to say) to someone when you first find out they have cancer
• How to be supportive without being intrusive
• How to build a winning health-care team
• How to handle holidays, birthdays, and anniversaries
• How to explain the disease to children
• Which gifts and gestures can do the most good

From techniques for handling anger and anxiety, to uplifting success stories, to a comprehensive resource section, here is the information and inspiration you need to help those you love and to make each day--each moment--more precious.

When Life Becomes Precious will be the first book to:
• Offer tips on ways to help patients, caregivers and co-workers
• Provide a long and diverse list of gifts that are appropriate to give to families that are living with cancer
• Offers reasons why fear makes people shy away from discussing cancer and techniques on how to overcome that fear
• Present the things that families do that doctors like and dislike

When Life Becomes Precious will teach readers to assess and put into perspective, their own feelings about the disease so that they can truly help those who are afflicted with it. The use of cartoons, anecdotes and personal stories will set an upbeat and positive tone. Readers will come away fully prepared to deal with the realities of cancer.

Elise NeeDell Babcock was the founder of Cancer Counseling Inc., the first agency of its kind to provide free professional counseling to people coping with cancer during any stage of the disease. She and CCI were honored by M. D. Anderson Cancer Center as partners in the fight against cancer. Elise was a radio co-host for Talk America and lectured across the country at places such as Yale, Stanford, and Northwestern medical schools. She died in 2010.