TThink about how shocked you felt on Friday by the Princess of Wales’ cancer news, multiply that by a thousand, and you have some idea of what it feels like to receive a diagnosis. Even if you’ve practiced hearing bad news while waiting for test results, you may not be prepared to be told you have the disease.
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer in the summer of 2022, I was stunned. I didn’t think I would leave the hospital and have to tell my family and friends that I was sick. I hadn’t rehearsed those conversations in my head.
If you’ve ever told people about pregnancy, there are some parallels. Due to circumstances, you end up telling people you don’t really know before you’ve told everyone you love; you don’t always know what people are experiencing and what the news will mean to them.
One of the first things the doctor asked was if I had children. I have a son who had just turned 12 at the time, so the Macmillan nurse gave me a booklet on how to talk to children about cancer.
There was some good advice in there, and on the website, but what my partner and I struggled with was when. On the first night after my diagnosis, my partner and I had to talk and start processing what I had been told and what we knew. On the second night my son had scouting, on the third a school event. We didn’t want to disrupt normal life right away – and I was afraid these could be the last days – so we didn’t want to keep him at home. We didn’t want to tell him when he got home and was about to go to bed.
We discussed whether we should wait until all my test results came back so we knew the prognosis before sitting him down. This is why I waited to tell many other people, and why it took months before I started writing about what happened. There’s something scary about telling people you’re sick and not being able to answer the question of how sick they are even when they don’t ask. And it feels like fate to put a positive spin on it before you know the treatment is going to work. It’s important to measure the disease before you broadcast that you have the disease, and that means waiting.
With my son, we decided to tell him what we knew before we knew everything. I had already told other family and friends. I had also told the mailman when I opened the door sobbing and to the owner of the Airbnb where we would be staying on vacation, and it seemed wrong that one of the most important people in my life was still in limbo. On the fourth evening we had tea, then I told him I had bad news, that I had breast cancer and would be receiving treatment, and that I promised to tell him everything he wanted to know.
I thought I would destroy his world, but I didn’t. He was clearly upset, but he didn’t understand the disease in the same way as the adults in my life did, and so was less shocked. The next morning he had some questions about radiotherapy – he had read about the first treatment that burned people – and as time went on other, rather technical, questions arose. I didn’t tell his school, which may have been a mistake, but I did tell his close friends’ parents because I wanted them to tell their children in case the subject came up. I didn’t want them asking questions he couldn’t answer. don’t answer.
Some people never tell anyone. Some people never tell their children. This was not the right option for me. I should have been more organized in the beginning, but I also knew that I wanted people to know why I wasn’t participating in normal life. But there were people I didn’t tell for months because I wanted a part of my life that was free of cancer talk. Eventually I even told them, but on my own time.