Some days you need a serious chat. Some days you need a friend to be silly with. Some days you need a friend to go shopping and have a gossip session with and try to put cancer in the back seat for a few hours. There are many ways to be supportive.

No one deliberately says something hurtful to someone diagnosed with a disease. But sometimes, it comes out, and it's hard to stop.

If it takes a village to raise a child, you might say it also takes one to care for the sick. Cancer is at once personal and communal. And yet, caring for the sick can feel like writing a travelogue about a country you've never visited. You can't know where you haven't been.

Cancer is a serious, life-threatening illness that kills more than half a million people every year in the U.S. alone. But you'd never know that if you get most of your information from newspapers and magazines.