@janbb: I am in a similar situation as the friend. I don’t put it on social media, as I tend to try to keep my personal life off Facebook or Fluther. My close friends know. I can tell you that when someone described my relative (who has cancer) as a fighter, it was very reassuring to me. With cancer, you have only two options. Fight it (meaning get treated for it) or let it go and die quicker than you would otherwise. I am also not religious, but when people tell me they are praying for her, I find that very comforting. I find any words of encouragement to be helpful. So I don’t think that it’s a negative thing to “assume” the woman is a fighter. If she is alive, she has fought it and she has won so far.
I find that cancer now is a chronic condition, not a death sentence like it used to be. I work with several people who have had recurring cancer and they just get treated for it as it arises and they go on. They work, they drive, they do everything we do. My relative with cancer had it metastasize, and in the autumn, she was in bed, in pain, unable to do anything except get up to go to the bathroom and to leave the house to go to the doctor. She could not cook. She could not drive, she could not even go down the steps to sit outside. Now she does everything everybody else does. She arose like a Phoenix. We marvel at her and we all say it’s a chronic condition. You don’t get cured, but you do get better. It will come back and the question is, will it come back in a year, two years, three years, five years, who knows. All we know is that we have her with us now.