A chaise longue. “My dad gave me one so I could lie down without feeling totally sickly and sitting in the bedroom all day,” says former cancer patient Jan Colbert of Columbia, Missouri.Tickets to a show in six months’ time.TiVo, if there is a long recovery ahead and a need of guilty-pleasure time.Homemade soup.Monetary gifts. They may seem callous, but illnesses cost a lot of money. “Even with excellent insurance coverage, we spent several thousand dollars on medical expenses last year, most of which was covered by the generous donations of friends, family, coworkers, and parents of my students,” says Jamie Myers of Eugene Oregon, whose husband had leukemia (now in remission). “If we hadn’t had financial assistance, we would still be paying.”
