It is strange how we forget that the person is themselves and think the illness has changed who they are to us, how we should relate to them. I was just on vacation and talking to two women around the pool where we were staying and in the middle of the conversation it changed to health care and the woman started in on her cancer treatment and she has stage 4 breast cancer! But it wasn't awkward, we kept talking about health care and how it could be done better and about out lives. If I had known she was that ill before we started talking, I probably would have gone back inside, not knowing how to talk to her. But since we were having a great conversation when her illness came into it, that made it easy to just incorporate all we were talking about.