Dealing with unhelpful and unsolicited advice.
When you tell people that you have cancer, people offer you their advice about how to cure it regardless of whether you have asked for their advice or not. This advice is often well meaning but often so off beat and not relevant. It can be hard to know sometimes what to say to people who give their unsolicited advice to you.
The two weirdest pieces of advice I received relate to fruits and vegetables. A friend of mine told me that his friend cured her cancer by eating an endless supply of carrots. Suddenly, I had this image in my head of me endlessly and crazily eating huge piles of carrots like I was bugs bunny, or of me turning orange from head to toe like I was one of the naughty children from “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”. Thankfully my friend did not persist in his advice to me. The other more awkward piece of advice I kept receiving was from a colleague who was so convinced about a cure from cancer that he read about on the internet (extracting and eating the seeds contained in apricot kernels – Hash tag don’t try this at home, not scientific or proven!) that he kept on telling me about it and kept asking me if I had done it. After a while his advice just became uncomfortable and awkward as this was not something I was ever going to try.
While I believe having a healthy diet helps to maintain my health and quality of life while I live with my brain cancer, there is more to it than carrots and apricots!
Well, that’s all folks.
What unhelpful advice have you received from friends and colleagues and how have you handled it?
Image: Bugs Bunny eating a carrot. Warner Bros. Cartoons. Loony Tunes show.