A short handbook of cancer etiquette?

Quite a few years ago, a friend was in his final months of an existence shortened by lung cancer.  He was barely the age that I am now and was one of the few who ended up with lung cancer without ever having been a smoker--he didn't even hang around a lot with smokers for any secondhand effects! 
In my interactions during those last few months, I realized the fruitlessness of an ordinary question/greeting: "how are you?"  The awkwardness of this question forced me to to simply greet him with a hello/hi [name].  I mean, what can you really say?

Christopher Hitchens, who is battling cancer and has been writing about it as well, has the latest on his experiences: "Miss Manners and the Big C":

It’s normally agreed that the question “How are you?” doesn’t put you on your oath to give a full or honest answer. So when asked these days, I tend to say something cryptic like “A bit early to say.” (If it’s the wonderful staff at my oncology clinic who inquire, I sometimes go so far as to respond, “I seem to have cancer today.”) Nobody wants to be told about the countless minor horrors and humiliations that become facts of “life” when your body turns from being a friend to being a foe: the boring switch from chronic constipation to its sudden dramatic opposite; the equally nasty double cross of feeling acute hunger while fearing even the scent of food; the absolute misery of gut-wringing nausea on an utterly empty stomach; or the pathetic discovery that hair loss extends to the disappearance of the follicles in your nostrils, and thus to the childish and irritating phenomenon of a permanently runny nose. Sorry, but you did ask …