On Asking the Right Question

In a study! of 120 recently diagnosed cancer patients, social researchers demonstrated statistically what cancer care professionals have always known. During the first three months after diagnosis, the time of "existential plight," there is a preponderance of thoughts about life and death, and patients tend to see themselves in "a luckless predicament in which one's very existence seems endangered." Independent of site of tumor, age, sex and social status of the patient, the predominant concerns of newly diagnosed patients are existential. These concerns about life and the person's questions about its fraility and meaning come in many forms, but they invariably confront the listener with his or her own vulnerability, mortality and wonderment about the meaning of life.