I'm Alan Olga and this is Clear and Vivit, conversations about connecting and communicating.

After I got sick, I felt outraged.

Why me?

Like I'm a decently good person and almost everything that was happening to me was totally out of

my control and I needed to get real about that quick.

In my family, when we have hard things to talk about anything, it could be even death.

We're kind of funny about it because that's the way we talk.

We like to have fun while we're talking about hard things.

But I ran into someone doing this podcast who was given the worst possible news and turned

it into a charming, funny, insightful book.

I think you'll really enjoy listening to the conversation I had with Kate Boller.

We talked in our studio in Manhattan and from the minute she came in, she was bubbling

with energy and a really disarming sense of humor.

If you hadn't read her book, you probably wouldn't know she was diagnosed with stage 4 colon

cancer.

I think maybe this was because she's had to devote so much time, so much practice to

how she relates to the people around her.

And this was true from the first minute she heard about how serious her illness was.

It turns out to be really important who tells you and how they explain it to you.

When I first heard the words stage 4 cancer, they gave me the intern.

I mean, I was lying in a hospital bed and this sweet little, basically 12-year-old in

medicine with the shortest coat came by and he was like, hey, he looked so nervous in

...