reaction to his colon cancer diagnosis at age thirty-five was very different from his. “She was scared and upset; I was calm and reserved because I had no idea of the impending doom,” Mike recalls. “The night of the diagnosis we argued because she didn’t understand why I wasn’t more upset and I didn’t understand why she was so upset. It was a really difficult time for both of us.” Mike’s experience is not at all unusual. We tend to marry our “opposites,” and when it comes time to deal with a cancer diagnosis, we often have opposite ways of handling the situation. Often one partner “feels” more
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