What I Think When I Think About Cancer

Phil Williams

Cancer played a big part in our family lives when I was young, but wasn’t something we really talked about afterwards. It’s natural not to dwell on it, I think, when it’s passed, but it looms bigger in my mind now than it did before. I can’t help feeling that if we had talked about it a little more, my mum might still be alive today.

 

My experiences of cancer come from the sidelines, having seen others endure it. I have been diagnosed with a BRCA+ gene mutation, but I haven’t put many thoughts together on what that means to me yet. When I think of cancer, it’s more about what it’s meant for my loved ones, and how I could’ve done more to understand and prepare for it in the past.

I hope that these reflections will make me more vigilant about it in the future, for myself and for others, and that by discussing it a little here I can spread some of that message.

Some of my earliest memories are of children’s hospitals

One of my brothers got leukaemia at an early age. I didn’t know what it was at the time, only that he was in hospital a lot. I often went with him, enjoying the opportunity to get out of school, and freely explored the labyrinthine halls of Great Ormond Street Hospital untended, as everyone else had bigger things to worry about than where I was.

 

I knew he was very ill, but I never had much conception of how serious it was. He went through a lot, but he got better. Afterwards, you’d never have known he was ill; when I joined him for ongoing hospital check-ups, I had even less idea what they were for. As far as I was aware, it had been unfortunate and inconvenient, but his illness had passed smoothly.

 

I didn’t realise he could’ve died – or how lucky we were that he didn’t. I had even less idea how that must’ve affected my parents. Thinking about it now, I fear the trauma they went through made them less likely to want to talk about cancer, rather than more wary of it.

 

It was maybe twenty years later that I properly chatted to my brother about it when we were drunk in Bognor, and I got a better of idea of what he and my parents had gone through while I was gallivanting around hospital canteens. But even then I didn’t fully appreciate the magnitude of it all until my mum died.

When we lost my mother

We learnt of my mother’s cancer too late to make a difference.

 

By the time we realised she had it, the chances of stopping it were minimal. It had spread so far, we needed a miracle, and none came. Everyone did everything they could, but sometimes that’s simply not enough. Some things cannot be avoided.

 

However, my mum was ill for a long time before she was diagnosed. She had symptoms as much as year before the diagnosis, I believe. The one thing we couldn’t do, which we needed to do, was to act sooner.

 

I’m not sure to what degree mistakes were made with earlier scans, but regardless, we didn’t appreciate how serious her illness was quickly enough. She didn’t make a fuss. She was selfless, and at the cusp of carving out a new life for herself. She didn’t have the time, or the inclination, to be ill. Who of us ever does?

 

We collectively didn’t have the sensitivity to see it for what it was, though. She was full of life, bubbly, wonderful, and you can’t imagine that anything that terrible could happen to such a special person.

 

Yet it’s something that we might have imagined, with a bit more reflection on our own past.

 

When I think of cancer now, I have this contrast in mind, these thoughts that we were able to save my brother, but didn’t even see it coming for mum. They weren’t exactly the same situation, and there was surely a degree of luck involved in both cases, but I don’t doubt my mum was more attentive to our needs than her own, and that surely made a difference.

The poison of silence

I don’t blame anyone nor harbour resentment. Cancer itself simply isn’t fair or reasonable, so there’s no sense judging it. But I regret that we live in a society that locks down emotions, promoting silent endurance. It pushes us to always be busy, so no one has time to stop and rest, or to be ill.

 

Silent endurance creates a cycle where we’re not used to talking about feeling bad, in any way, so when we really, desperately need to, we don’t have the means. When we’re not practised in it, the attempts we do make to reach out then prove stilted, ineffective, or just too difficult. We fail to get the help we want, and we retreat from trying.

 

We wait things out, ignore them, hope it’ll all go away. Or we pretend the bad things never happened, or never will happen, instead of openly sharing our pain and learning from it.

 

My mother gave up everything for us as she strove never to complain.

 

Unfortunately, cancer doesn’t care about how strong we appear on the outside. Leave it alone, let it be, and it thrives.

We could all be more open

My mother’s death was a wake-up call, and we’ll forever live with that question, what if we’d done something sooner? Like my brother’s illness, though, it’s still too easy to leave it grimly behind us.

 

I easily imagine going back to never thinking about cancer again. My brother even asked me recently how I felt about discovering I had a BRCA+ gene mutation, and my honest response was that I hadn’t thought much about it.

 

It’s easy not to care, until you’re forced to.

 

I’m fortunate though, that I’m not alone in this. I was lucky enough to marry a wonderful wife who comes from a different background (in Poland) where she is very quick to react to any medical concerns, and takes no chances when it comes to health. She’s gradually been wearing me down on actually paying attention and getting help when things feel wrong.

 

I’m equally fortunate to have a caring family who have come together more than ever after my mother’s death, especially considering the work my sister has done in raising awareness of the BRCA+ gene mutation responsible for my mother’s cancer. All of us in our family are now more ready to spot the signs, and to discuss it, in large part thanks to her. It means we are more able, and likely, to share what news, advice or concerns, we might each come across on our own.

 

It means we’re more likely to survive when cancer comes again – or even to avoid it.

 

While we lost an amazing woman in my mother, too soon, we are determined to limit the chances of what happened to her happening to us. And it’s inspiring to see Christen spreading that message to so many others around the world. I hope it will encourage others to be more vigilant too, so that in future, whatever other threats cancer presents, the real killer is never simply that we weren’t ready for it.

 

It all starts with thinking about it more. Then learning more. Then sharing with, and supporting, each other.

 

Thank you for sharing this with us Phil. The message around talking more openly as a family is so important and is something that will definitely ring true for many people.