It's an interesting thread and I wonder if there is another aspect to the whole "I've got cancer - my life is over" scenario. I'm looking back on my own diagnosis and how I reacted. I felt a strange feeling almost of relief because it had been caught earlyish (PSA 7.2 - Gleason 7 Stage T2B) but there was something else going on and it's this:-
I expected I would get cancer. My Dad died at 57 of PCa and my brother had been diagnosed 2 years before me. For years I have thought I would get cancer, the family history both for this cancer and one or two others isn't great.
The other aspect was my age. I'm 70 later this year - 3 score years and 10 as the bible has it (or so I'm told - I am not a religious person) and I am now getting to that "count your blessings" stage because I have seen, as we all probably have, many people being taken in their early 50s or even earlier. A former colleague and friend died last October at 53, a member of a walking group I'm in died of breast cancer at a similar age back in 2005.
So I was expecting to get cancer and I'm pretty old. My reaction is tempered by those facts. What this thread brings home to me is how important emotional support is and how it's really important to tailor it to the individual. A guy who gets this disease in his early 50s and with no good reason to expect he would get it is in a much darker place than somebody like me.
Don't get me wrong. I hate having this illness and my fears centre around the later stages of the disease. My father's death in 1971 was agonising.
But everybody is different and perhaps we need, as a society, to recognise this a bit more. Some will take the news better than others.