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Do’s and Don’ts of Supporting a Colleague with Breast Cancer
Statistically speaking, if you work with women, you’ll eventually work with someone with breast cancer. Here are the dos and don’ts of supporting a colleague in this situation.
The women in the bathroom
Even when a doctor looked me in the eyes and told me she saw something “very worrying” on my mammogram, it didn’t actually occur to me that I might have breast cancer. I was, I thought, the healthiest person I knew. I scheduled a biopsy of the suspicious little mass in my left breast, but I did not lose sleep.
That I was not worried seems nuts to me now. One in eight women born in the United States today will be diagnosed with breast cancer at some point in her life. If you don’t count minor skin cancers, breast cancer is far and away the most common cancer found in women, accounting for one-third of all women’s cancer diagnoses every year. Breast cancer is so common that we all need a plan for how to respond when a colleague gets it.
If you work with women, statistically speaking, you’ll eventually work with someone who has it. I was fortunate enough to work with people who mostly responded appropriately; still, there were many reactions that, while well-intentioned, didn’t help. Here are the dos and don’ts of how to support a colleague in this situation.
DO: ACT LIKE A SUPPORTIVE FRIEND
When I got the call with the results of my biopsy, I was in a busy WeWork getting ready to go into a meeting. I had been working remotely for a few weeks on a new team, and we were all meeting in person for the first time. I arrived outside our meeting space a little early; one of my new colleagues was sitting across from me, chatting on the phone. We waved our hellos, and my phone rang; it was a nurse practitioner. She came right out with it, “You have cancer.” There were scientific names, technical terms, and scary words like “malignant” and “aggressive.” She started listing one million next steps that I was not prepared to process standing there in front of all the younger male colleagues that I had not really met yet. I ducked into the women’s bathroom.
Unbeknownst to me, the two other women on my team were already in the bathroom. I finished the call in a stall, flushed the toilet, and walked out to find my new teammates washing their hands. Obviously, I’d been crying. Also, they’d overheard the call.
Fortunately, my colleagues reacted as if one of their best friends had just been diagnosed. They circled me in a big hug. They let me cry even though we were all now late for the kickoff meeting.
I eventually told the whole team what was going on, and they all reacted like friends would, bringing me food and sending me gifts throughout my treatment. Friendship at work carries a ton of weight. I always knew my friends at work had my back, which helped reduce my anxiety at a time when I had a lot to worry about. They created an incredibly supportive work culture, and because of that, I thrived at work despite the difficulty of my treatment.
DON’T: TEXT “HOW ARE YOU?”
People said a few well-intentioned things that I now try not to say to others. The most common one was people asking me how I was doing on Slack or text. My real answer was often “shitty in these 1,000 ways,” but I’d respond, “Hanging in there!”, which would leave me feeling unseen.
Similarly, lots of people texted “F*ck Cancer,” which was meant to be supportive but didn’t resonate with me. Ditto platitudes like, “You’ll get through this!”
More meaningful were reminders that they had my back and that they were holding me in their hearts. Some of the most touching (and surprising) messages I got were pink heart emojis from male executives. Here is the most memorable text I received:
“I wanted to reach out to say that I so strongly feel that with your personal ethos and spirit, you will crush this thing. You, more than anyone I know, must have a fierce, determined, and positive army of warrior cells that will not let the invaders win. Plus, you have an external army—all of us who love you—willing you on to victory. These are unstoppable forces. You are a beast. You are a badass. You got this.”
Maybe you aren’t that emotive; that’s okay. The best thing you can do is be persistent in your efforts to show your colleague that you care about them.
DO: MAKE ROOM FOR VULNERABILITY
It’s not that you shouldn’t ask your colleagues how they are doing; it’s that it needs to be done so that they can answer truthfully. And if they are being real, they might be like I was: emotional.
It’s rare for someone to normalize emotions at work, and many women fear that they will be penalized for expressing their feelings. However, research shows that women who cry at work due to personal circumstances are not usually evaluated negatively by their colleagues.
It meant a lot to me when I could be real and when my colleagues were truly empathetic. It takes so little time to say, “How are you doing today?” at the start of a 1-on-1 and then to respond by naming the emotions that surface. “That’s so scary,” you might say when someone expresses fear, or “It’s okay that you are exhausted; you don’t have to pretend with me.”
I am cancer-free now—early detection saved my life—and through the worst of my treatment. My treatment wasn’t easy for anyone; it meant many of my colleagues had to do more work.
The silver lining of breast cancer for us all was the friendship that came when my colleagues at BetterUp created space for me to be real. We don’t often talk about the hardest things in our lives at work, but when we do, we are rewarded with the thing that matters most in this sometimes too-short life: deep connection.
A version of this post was originally published on FastCompany.com.
