Counseling for Serious Illness and Medical Stress

What It Can Look Like

• The strange flatness of the first few weeks, when you are making decisions you do not feel qualified to make.
• The dread before every scan, and the crash after the good result.
• Being tired of being asked how you are, and then, months later, noticing that people have stopped asking.
• Feeling guilty for struggling when the news was good.
• Not wanting to say any of this at home because everyone there is already frightened.

The Drive

Around here, serious illness usually also means driving. To Saginaw, to Ann Arbor, sometimes further, over and over, often in winter. Hours in the car with your own thoughts, appointments where you are a long way from anyone who knows you, and a treatment center nowhere near your kitchen table. That is its own weight on top of the illness, and we can be somewhere closer to home to set it down for an hour.

For the Person Who Is Not Ill

If you are the spouse, the parent, or the adult child doing the driving and the paperwork and the holding-it-together, we welcome you too. Caregivers are usually the last to ask for anything, so please do ask.

What This Covers

Cancer, from the first appointments through treatment and survivorship. Chronic illness and chronic pain. Transplant. Grief, and the anticipatory grief that starts long before a loss.

What This Is, and What It Is Not

This is counseling alongside your medical care, not a part of it. Ann Marie is a Licensed Professional Counselor. Questions about the illness itself and its treatment stay with the people treating it. What happens here is the other half: the fear, the exhaustion, the decisions, the long quiet afterward, and coping tools for the scan week, the sleepless nights and the conversations at home that everyone is avoiding. With your written permission, she can work alongside the people treating you.

Coming From Tawas City, West Branch or Oscoda

People come to us for counseling alongside serious illness from right across the Sunrise Side. A weekly appointment is a weekly drive, so here are the road times to our office in Hale.

• Tawas City, about 32 minutes by road.
• West Branch, about 40 minutes by road.
• Oscoda, in Iosco County, about 45 minutes by road.

Tell us which town you are coming from when you call, and we will help you find the times that make sense with the drive. On the longer drives, a longer appointment spaced further apart sometimes suits better than a weekly hour, and we are happy to set it up that way. We list road times from the rest of the area on our service area page.

Reviewed by Ann Marie Shay, MA, LPC, CTP, MITS, September 2026.