Think about how shocked you felt after hearing the Princess of Wales’s cancer news on Friday, multiply that by a thousand, and you go some way to knowing how it feels to get a diagnosis. Even if you’ve rehearsed hearing bad news while you wait for test results, you cannot be prepared for being told you have the disease.
When I got my breast cancer diagnosis in the summer of 2022 I was stunned. I hadn’t imagined that I would be leaving the hospital and having to tell my family and friends that I was ill. I hadn’t rehearsed those conversations in my head.
If you’ve ever told people about a pregnancy there are some parallels. Through circumstance you end up telling some people who you don’t really know before you’ve told everyone you love; you don’t always know of people’s own experience and what the news will mean to them.
One of the first things the doctor asked was whether I had children. I have a son who at that point had just turned 12, so the Macmillan nurse gave me a booklet about how to talk to children about cancer.
There was some great advice in it, and on the website, but the thing my partner and I wrestled with was the when. On the first evening after my diagnosis my partner and I needed to talk and start to digest what I’d been told and what we knew. On the second evening my son had Scouts, on the third a school event. We didn’t want to disrupt normal life straightaway – and I worried that these could be the last days of it – so we didn’t want to keep him home. We didn’t want to be telling him when he got home and was just about to go to bed.
We discussed whether to wait until all of my test results were back so we knew the prognosis before we sat him down. This is the reason I waited to tell lots of other people, and that it was months before I started to write about what was happening.
There’s something scary about telling people you’re ill and not being able to answer the question of how ill, even if they don’t ask. And it feels like tempting fate to put on a positive spin before you know the treatment is going to work. It’s important to get the measure of the illness before you broadcast that you have it, and that means waiting.
With my son, we decided to tell him what we knew before we knew everything. I’d already told other family and friends. I’d also told the postman when I opened the door sobbing and the owner of the Airbnb we were supposed to be staying in on holiday, and it seemed wrong that one of the most important people in my life was still in the dark. On the fourth evening we had tea, then I told him I had bad news and that I had breast cancer and was going to get treatment and that I promised to tell him anything he wanted to know.
I thought I was going to shatter his world, but it wasn’t like that. He was obviously upset, but he didn’t understand the disease in the same way as the adults in my life, so was less shocked. The next morning he had some questions about radiotherapy – he’d read about the early treatment burning people – and as time went on there were other, quite technical, questions.
I didn’t tell his school, which may have been a mistake, but I did tell parents of his good friends, as I wanted them to tell their children in case the subject came up – I didn’t want them asking questions he couldn’t answer.
Some people never tell anyone. Some people never tell their children. This wasn’t the right option for me – it would have involved being more organised for a start, but also I knew I wanted people to know why I wasn’t taking part in life as usual. But there were people I didn’t mention it to for many months because I wanted a bit of my life that was cancer-talk free. In the end I told even them, but in my own time.
