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    Nervous about speaking to someone touched by serious illness? Here’s my advice | Alison Murdoch

    When my husband developed a life-threatening illness, my world fell apart – but I was saved by others’ kindness. Here’s my advice on how to help in this situation
    by Alison Murdoch Jun 09, 2017 4 minutes
    Hands holding each other over a table / PeopleImages.com / Getty Images

    At 2.30pm on a sunny July afternoon, I was chopping salad for a late lunch when my 58-year-old husband stumbled up the front path looking half-dead. For the next five weeks I sat by Simon’s bedside in the intensive care unit of St Thomas’ hospital in London while he lay unconscious in a life-threatening coma as a result of viral encephalitis.

    Over the course of the next months and years, he would eventually complete an extraordinary recovery, but during that five weeks, as a complete newcomer to hospital life, I learned more than I ever wanted to know about what Susan Sontag calls “the kingdom of the sick”.

    The serious illness of a friend or family member is

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