Lately I've been visiting forums for people affected by cancer. One issue that seems to cause great hurt is when someone inevitably says 'the wrong thing'. It's something I touched on in my book Their Cancer - Your Journey, so I decided to share my thoughts with you:
"Shock can make people say the most appalling things. In the UK we have an expression 'open mouth and insert foot' - very strange I know. I'm not sure why we refer to saying something insensitive as 'putting our foot in it' (although it may have a farming connection), but we do. Sometimes it doesn't even have to be caused by shock, just by not thinking before speaking.
You will probably find that many people say 'the wrong thing' to you. I could quite possibly be one of them. You could get horribly offended about that. You could even tell yourself for years about how thoughtless they have been. If this has already happened to you, then pause for a moment. Can you remember a time when you said something you regretted? It could have been in an interview, or the heat of an argument. You probably knew it was the wrong thing to say almost at once. Did you apologise and fix the issue then, or let it fester until later?
