Hi Wonderful Readers, I wanted to tell you that I’m writing a feature  on women, friendship and illness for MORE Magazine and ask for your input.

The piece will focus on what friends need from their friends when they are facing a chronic condition — whether it’s lupus, fibro, RA, Lyme, MS, you name it — or a more acute situation, such as cancer. My hope is to give women who are ill a voice to talk openly about what serves them best when they are sick, and how friends can say and do the most supportive things. And to also help all of us who have a friend who is ill to be the best friend we can.

We all know this is tricky territory. It’s hard, when someone is ill, to know what to do and say without saying or doing the wrong thing. Who among us who has faced chronic illness hasn’t seen both sides — the friend who was there, making our kids grilled cheese sandwiches without our asking them to, or the one who came and got our kids dressed and drove them to school every day without ever once talking about her own busy schedule? Or who simply sat by our bed and asked, “Hey, what kind of day is it for you today?” And we have seen the opposite, too. The well-meaning friends who said insensitive things. Maybe we’ve learned a lot about who our friends really are by how they behaved when we were really ill.

It’s not easy to know what to say and do when someone we love is sick or seriously ill, and when we are sick it’s hard to know how to ask for what we need. As s a society we’re just not all that comfy having conversations about illness openly.

We also know, and studies show, that having warm, caring friendships is good for our immune systems. It helps us both physically and emotionally to have strong ties.

This piece will explore all this and more.

So, in order to make the piece as rich and honest as it can be, I’m looking to interview some of my amazing female readers who fit MORE’s age demographic (between the ages of 40 and 60) who are also facing chronic or even quite serious chronic conditions. If you are interested, and are between 40 and 60, reply below just to let me know a bit about what you’re facing physically (a sentence or two will do), and whether this topic is something that’s been on your mind, and why. I’ll reach out to you to discuss more.

Thanks readers! Oh, and you can read my previous two part feature on how illness impacts the lives of mid-life women here: “Ill in a Day’s Work” and “How a Marriage Survives When One Partner Gets Sick.”