Living with cancer is hard even when it's not your own

Josh Burt recounts what happened when his wife, Hannah, was diagnosed with the disease in February and how he had to learn to deal with his own response to a terrifying situation

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If there’s a correct reaction to your wife telling you she has cancer, I’m still not sure what it is. Tears? Fainting? Complete denial? One evening in February this year, it was my turn to find out. “I’m so sorry,” Hannah says, as if she’s somehow “caught cancer” on purpose.

She’s still shell-shocked. I’m not sure I’ve taken a breath; I feel numb. I instinctively put my hands to my temples, applying pressure as if I’m trying to reboot my brain. She doesn’t seem ill at all. She had an appointment with the urologist after spotting a tiny bit of blood in her wee, and we thought nothing of it. But now she has bladder cancer. The kids are downstairs waiting to be fed; we don’t have much time to talk.

“So... like, you mean, definitely? They don’t need to...?” I say, trailing off. “When?” I add, for further confusion – because let’s be honest, “When?” doesn’t make a whole lot of sense in this context. When what? When did this happen? “When?” as in “How long have you got?”

In the weeks following this clunky exchange of information, I’ve realised that nailing the appropriate response to someone telling you they have cancer really doesn’t come naturally to many of us.

“Shit! The beans!” I say suddenly, remembering the saucepan on the hob downstairs in the kitchen. The side dish for the kids’ next culinary adventure. I’ve got to stop them coagulating into an inedible mush (the beans, not the kids). They’re 10 and seven (the kids, not the beans) and I’ve no idea what we’ll tell them. We hug each other.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” I say, even though I wouldn’t confidently swear that in a court of law. Everything might not be fine at all; everything might be awful. My wife has cancer.