Hi Catte,

The best person to ask is your friend. Get her on her own and ask her how she is really feeling and whether you can help in any way. This could be something as simple and easy as taking her son to watch the latest Star Wars film, something hard and complicated like discussing her wishes for funeral arrangements or advanced directives (DNR), she may just need a friend with whom she can have a rant and a cry or she might want someone to talk about normal everyday things and enable her to forget the cancer for an hour or two.

So many of us people who have cancer put on a good show as we are programmed by society to believe that no-one else with cancer feels lonely, frightened, angry, irritable, tired, depressed or lacks hope. Others are genuinely unfazed by it all and get really hacked off when people assume we're in the first category and come on all touchy-feely.

The problem for our friends and families is that both groups look and sound the same from the outside - a lose-lose situation, if no-one takes the time and effort to actually ask us. 

Good luck :-)

Dave