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Life | Life Lessons | Health

How To Help Your Friends Stay Alive

Karen Brenchley
Three-Minute Reads
Published in
4 min readOct 20, 2024

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Pay attention.

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When I was a kid there were only three channels on TV, plus PBS. ABC, CBS, and NBC were required to play Public Service Announcements during children’s programming, one of which was The Seven Warning Signs of Cancer. I heard them so often as a kid that I used to be able to repeat the entire list, with the same serious tone of voice, well into adulthood.

A Persistent Cough, or Cold

Do you have a friend who’s a Nice Guy? You know, who is always there to help, always there to listen, liked and respected by all your friends, but always seems to go home by himself?

That was my friend Simon. We were casual friends who had known each other for years, as we were in the same larger social group. Because people do, a large number of them in our larger social group liked to gossip. I am very good at noticing small details about people’s behavior so I usually knew what was going on based on subtle actions, and the gossipers always made sure I knew who was dating who.

Because of this, I knew Simon was in love, and wasn’t loved back.

One afternoon I was working on a project that Simon was also working on, and I noticed he was coughing periodically. The previous time…

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Three-Minute Reads
Three-Minute Reads

Published in Three-Minute Reads

Got a minute or three? Short reads for busy folks.

Karen Brenchley
Karen Brenchley

Written by Karen Brenchley

Want to know about AI, ML, or data science? Ask me. I've worked in development in Silicon Valley, & am an aikido nidan, published fiction writer, & MS survivor.

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