The morning after I found out I had cancer, I woke up and, for perhaps one or two seconds, I didn’t remember.
I’ve had that feeling before after a horrible break-up. You wake up and everything is fine. You’re just you, waking up on an ordinary morning. And then you remember. There is this horrible drop in the pit of your stomach as reality catches up with you.
I had cancer.
And that day I had to tell my family.
I’d managed to keep the whole thing to myself until then. Nobody had known about the lump, the breast clinic, the biopsy or the appointment to get my results. That had been deliberate. I hadn’t wanted anyone worrying about something that might turn out to be nothing.
It had not turned out to be nothing.
My strategy had therefore developed something of a flaw.
One down
My mum lives about 200 miles away from me, so I decided to stop at my sister’s on the way. She lives about an hour and a half away and, if I’m honest, I thought telling her would probably be the easier of the two conversations.
I was going to see her, her husband and my niece, who was almost two. Shortly before I arrived, I pulled over around the corner from their house to sort out my make-up. My sister sent me a video.
My niece was standing at the window looking out for me, calling for me and waiting excitedly for me to arrive. That nearly finished me off. I had this tiny person who was absolutely delighted that I was coming to see her, and I was sitting around the corner trying to make myself look normal before walking into the house and telling her mother I had cancer.
When I arrived, my niece was thrilled to see me. I knew I couldn’t say anything while she was there. She was too young to understand what cancer meant, but she wasn’t too young to understand if her mum was upset.
So I held it together. We had lunch, we talked, and I behaved, I hope, reasonably normally.
Eventually, it was time for my niece to have her nap. I asked my sister whether her husband could take her upstairs because there was something important I needed to talk to her about. I think she knew from that point that something was seriously wrong.
As soon as they’d gone upstairs, I tried to tell her, and suddenly getting the words out was incredibly difficult. I don’t remember exactly what I said. Something about having had some tests. Something about having bad news.
And then I told her I had cancer.
My sister looked shocked and shaken. She hugged me and took me over to the sofa. She was kind and soothing and told me that I was going to be okay. I’d have treatment. It would be fine.
I wasn’t so sure.
I’d been diagnosed with an aggressive cancer the day before. I didn’t know whether it had spread. I didn’t know what my prognosis was. I knew I had months of treatment ahead of me, and at that point I couldn’t quite get to everything is going to be fine.
But I think my sister was giving me what she could in that moment: reassurance. She loved me, she hugged me, and she told me she would be there for whatever I needed.
And I’d told her.
Later, I messaged a friend:
“Managed to keep it together until little one went for her nap and I could tell her my news, which was a fucking achievement.”
It really was.
On the road again
I couldn’t stay long afterwards because I still had to drive to my mum’s. My sister had her husband with her, which made leaving slightly easier. She wasn’t going to be alone with what I’d just told her.
I got back into the car. My mum was about another three and a half hours away.
I put on an audiobook — The Blackbird Oracle, from the Discovery of Witches series — because I wanted something that might stop me thinking about what I was driving towards. It worked extremely badly.
I kept getting distracted and having to go backwards because I had absolutely no idea what I’d just listened to. There are limits to what even a good audiobook can achieve.
Eventually, I arrived. My mum was pleased to see me.
She had plans.
We were getting fish and chips.
Not before Strictly
I knew I needed to tell her. I also knew that the moment I did, the evening would be over. Nobody was going to want fish and chips after I’ve got cancer. So we got the fish and chips and ate dinner.
Then I discovered that my mum and her husband were extremely excited about that evening’s Strictly Come Dancing. It was the Blackpool episode.
Apparently everyone in her town watches it. Everyone. My mum had been looking forward to it, so I didn’t tell her.
I went upstairs to my old bedroom and waited while they watched Strictly downstairs. It was a deeply strange way to spend an evening when I was carrying around a piece of information that was going to change all of ours. But there was no advantage to my mum knowing at seven o’clock rather than nine. Once I told her, she could never go back to not knowing.
So she got her fish and chips.
She got Blackpool.
And then I went downstairs.
Telling my mum
Once Strictly had finished, I asked my mum if I could speak to her privately. Her husband went upstairs to give us some space.
I couldn’t just say it. I needed to lead her towards it somehow.
I told her I had some very bad news. I explained that I’d been having urgent tests at the hospital and that I’d had the results the day before.
And then I told her.
I had cancer.
I had spent more time worrying about this conversation than almost anything else.
My mum is an emotional person. She worries. She is fiercely protective of my sister and me and has an impressive ability to identify potential catastrophe in situations where the rest of us might struggle to find one.
Cancer wasn’t a hypothetical fear for her either.
Her own mother had died of cancer on the day I was born. My mum had become a mother and lost her own mother on the same day. She had a newborn baby to look after, so she did what she had to do and kept going. But that loss has never stopped being painful for her.
Years later, my mum had cancer herself. Hers was fortunately caught early and treated successfully, and afterwards she became involved with her local Macmillan community.
So I knew what the word cancer meant to her.
I thought telling her that her daughter had it would break her.
It didn’t. Or at least, she didn’t let it.
I was tearful. My mum went into fight mode.
“What kind of cancer?”
“What stage is it?”
“What are they going to do?”
I didn’t have answers to half the questions.
She wanted to know about treatment. She wanted to know whether I was at the best hospital. She wanted to know whether there were special treatments I could have. Whatever I needed, we would get it. If something needed paying for, we’d find the money.
And most urgently: why was the tumour still inside me?
My mum was not at all impressed by the concept of waiting for an MRI, and she was even less impressed by the possibility that chemotherapy might happen before surgery.
There was cancer. It was inside her daughter. Why had nobody removed it yet?
Out, out, out!
She was almost militaristic about the whole thing. We were going to fight it. We were going to throw everything at it. We were going to beat it.
This was not the reaction I’d expected from my mum at all.
I had expected tears.
Instead, I’d apparently accidentally activated a small general.
Trying to protect everyone
My mum held it together. So had my sister. In a way, the conversations went about as well as they possibly could have.
But afterwards I found myself worrying about what happened when I wasn’t there. My sister had looked so shaken. What happened after I drove away? My mum hadn’t cried in front of me. Did she cry when she was alone?
I wanted to protect them from what was happening to me.
I’d been doing it from the beginning. I hadn’t told anyone about the tests because I didn’t want them to worry. I’d waited until my niece was asleep because I didn’t want her to see her mum upset. I’d made sure my sister had her husband with her. I’d waited until after dinner because I didn’t want to ruin my mum’s meal. I’d waited until after Strictly because she’d been looking forward to it.
And then, after I’d finally told them, I worried about how they were coping with being told.
I knew, rationally, that none of them would have considered me a burden. I knew they wanted to help.
My friends did too. Once people knew, the amount of support they offered was extraordinary. I had known people would care. I don’t think I’d understood quite how much they would want to do something.
But there was a lesson in there that I was going to take considerably longer to learn.
I couldn’t have cancer and simultaneously protect everybody I loved from the fact that I had cancer.
And perhaps I didn’t have to.
I was allowed to be the person who needed looking after sometimes too.