My name is Natasha.
I'm married to my husband David and we've got two children together.
Our oldest is Charlie, he's my stepson. Charlie is nearly 13.
Our youngest is Alfie. Alfie has just turned eight.
Charlie lives with us half the time, he lives with his mum the other half the time,
so we have 50/50 custody and it's been like that all his life, we're very used to it,
it's a good setup for us all, especially Charlie: double Christmases and double birthdays! [Laughs]
My husband was diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. Diagnosis was in November 2017.
The biopsy was scheduled for Halloween and we had a big party planned so we decided that
if things were going to start going in the direction they looked like they were going in,
we wanted to make sure that the children still had as much of a normal life as possible.
We decided that we would tell the boys that there was going to be a biopsy
and we were going to tell them that it was on Halloween
and that we were going to still try and make sure they could do the trick-or-treating.
At that point we decided not to mention anything else other than the biopsy.
We took the boys out for coffee and a cake and we told them that dad had found a lump on his neck
and said that we'd seen a doctor and they wanted to cut it out
and then they were going to send it to a lab and have a look at it and see what it was.
We asked the boys, 'what do you think it could be, have you got any ideas?'
They said they had a conspiracy theory.
Charlie said he knew that Dave had been weird all his life and said it's probably an alien tracking device
and I knew that there was always something weird about you.
We left them like that. They thought it was quite funny.
The results came back and they told us then Dave's diagnosis.
We discussed it with Charlie's mum and stepdad
and together we discussed really what should we be telling them, is it too soon to tell them,
how much do we want them to know?
It's only natural to want to protect your children [starts to cry]
but we decided we couldn't protect them from this and it would be better to tell them everything that we knew
and help them through their feelings and anxieties and worries and stresses.
We didn't want them to feel like we were lying to them, we wanted them to be able to ask us questions
and all of us to really support each other.
We certainly didn't want the boys finding out from somebody else or hearing words
that we'd not spoken to them about, such as cancer or lymphoma or chemotherapy, by anybody else
and they were gonna see this, this was going to be in their life so honesty we decided was the best policy.
We said, 'dad's results have come back and it's not an alien tracking device unfortunately [laughs]
and I know he doesn't look poorly now but he is poorly and they need to start some treatment
and the treatment's going to make him look sick and it's going to make him feel sick.'
They didn't really say anything at first and it was at that point when Dave said,
'so, what do you know about cancer?'
Both of them said, 'cancer, you've got cancer?'
We said, 'yeah, yeah dad's got a kind of cancer.'
Alfie said, 'have you not been wearing sun cream?' straightaway.
So we said, 'no, it's not that type of cancer, it's nothing to do with being in the sun, it's nothing that he's done,
it's not from smoking or drinking, it couldn't have been prevented.'
Charlie had a couple of questions, he asked if he could catch the lymphoma which obviously we said no,
no you can't catch it. Will he get it when he's older was another question and we said no.
One of the things that my husband really didn't want to do was promise that everything was going to be okay
because we didn't know at that point what the prognosis was, [crying]
so we had to be careful that we didn't promise things like that.
They asked us, 'are you going to die?'
And Dave said, 'well yeah of course, of course I'm going to die, everybody dies
and I hope that I die before you because I don't want to see you die before me, that's not right.
And I hope that I don't die from cancer and I hope that the treatment works but you just don't know.'
We said to the boys that this is going to happen, there's nothing that we can do to stop it,
there's nothing that we could have done to stop it, cancer is now a chapter in our life
and we don't know what the last part of the story's going to be, we don't know how the story's going to end
but right now it's up to us to make sure that the chapters in the story are good.
We don't want to now use this as an excuse. There was no reason not to do our homework,
not to go to the swimming club.
That's the only promise that we made
and we promised that we would still do everything that we should be doing.
We explained that dad would be having chemo and that it was going to be one day in hospital
followed by a 21-day break.
In that 21 days he would have a period of time where he was quite poorly, then he would have a period of time
where he was getting a bit better and then the last week, he should feel a lot better,
and then back into the cycle, and that would happen six times.
So they were quite happy with that they, especially Charlie, likes a plan.
He likes the routine, he's very used to that; he knows which nights he's at his mum's,
he knows which nights he's at his dad's house.
So that routine for him was safe, very, very safe for him.
We thought with Charlie being 50 percent at his mum's and 50 percent at his dad's,
we could work it so that he wasn't with us when Dave was feeling his worst and
we could try and tailor it so it wasn't too difficult for him.
We actually thought that out of the two boys, Charlie would cope better than Alfie,
because Alfie would see it every single day.
As it turns out, Charlie, being away 50 percent of the time, worried more when he wasn't with us.
When we initially told Charlie, we were very aware that he had access to the Internet
and all the sources of information through his laptop, his phone.
Even just starting high school, we had no control over who he could be talking to in the playground
or what their experiences may be.
Again we couldn't protect him from outside information, so we told him that at the time.
We said, 'we can't protect you from hearing about somebody else's cancer
or somebody else who may have got cancer and not had successful treatment.
There's lots and lots of stories, everyone will have a different story about cancer
and sometimes they're not good.
All we can do is tell you what we know about dad's cancer and about dad's treatment.
Now, if you hear anything or if you read anything or see anything on TV,
then you can ask us at any time and we'll be honest about it.
But just with the lymphoma umbrella, there are over 60 different subtypes.'
When we explained that to him he was like, 'oh right, so it's not just cancer.'
There's cancer, and then there's this cancer and this cancer, and even within this cancer,
there's 60 different types of cancer. So what one person might have had or might not have had
would be different to what your dad has. So please don't worry too much about what you hear.'
So the treatment started in December. The anxiety and the worries over things that you really can't control,
in that first cycle, was difficult.
It was also going into the new routines. Charlie was swimming for club at the time
and he was training five times a week, at different swimming lessons which, previous to this,
Dave was taking him to.
His birthday was coming, it was his 12th birthday, his first bithday at high school
and then his routine started changing.
Other people were taking him to his swimming lessons, other people were taking him to school
and he wasn't at our house on the nights that he should have been because the treatment was happening
or I couldn't take Alfie and Charlie to school at the same time
because one was in one school, one was in another school.
A lot of changes happened and that started to worry Charlie.
Although looking back now, Dave was not too bad with his chemo, obviously he had various side effects,
but he avoided any infection, he avoided any hospital stays.
At the time, everything was such a worry and everything was such a stress
and Charlie started doing things like... forgetting his school tie or misplacing a book
and just one thing seemed to lead to another and he never really spoke about feeling tired or not sleeping
and it was going a little bit unnoticed.
And then one day, just after his birthday, his dad had started losing his hair,
which we know now really upset him,
we got a phone call from the school saying that Charlie had had an asthma attack.
Charlie's mum phoned me to say that the school had contacted her, we went to see the doctor together
and Charlie got checked over and there were no physical symptoms at all. [Crying.]
He'd actually been suffering with panic attacks.
At that point I wondered if we'd been too honest.
Looking back now, I don't think we could have done anything differently to make that better.
His GP was great and wanted to refer him for counseling
and unfortunately the counseling was a six-month waiting list.
We contacted a couple of charities and were referred to a local counseling service, through Macmillan actually,
and it specialised in counselling for children who are affected by cancer, which helped him massively,
absolutely massively. I mean the service was fantastic. I'd never even heard of it before.
I didn't realise that there was such a facility that was absolutely free, it cost us no money at all.
Charlie always said afterwards that he wanted to talk to us about his feelings [crying]
and he wanted to talk to his mum and his stepdad,
but he felt like he would upset us with how he was feeling.
He wanted to protect us from that,
but by not talking, it made him feel overwhelmed, under pressure and just not being able to cope.
So the counselling really did help.
Dave's last round of chemo was in the May and we knew after the chemo we had a wait before the PET scan.
So we decided to get back to normal life as much as possible.
One thing we did do, after his sixth session of chemo, and the boys knew that that was the end
because we told him in the beginning there were six sessions,
before the results they wanted to go and see a WWE wrestling thing and it was on in Birmingham actually.
It was on a school day, so we contacted the schools and said can we take them out of school,
and we had a big family day out.
That was a marker to them, that was, 'hurray we're able to do this and we're going to do it
and it's a celebration and dad's not having any more chemo for now, so let's do some nice things.'
So that was the first thing that we did.
The day that the PET scan came, nobody knew about it, we didn't even tell his parents.
He went for his PET scan and we waited for the results
and we went for the results without telling a single person which is something that we'd never done.
We decided that we may need a bit of time to think about the results.
The day of the results came, we saw my husband's consultant and he said,
'your recent PET scan showed that you are cancer free.'
So we came out, we picked the boys up, said, 'right, we're going out for tea, what do you want to do?'
And they both said McDonald's.
So we drove round to McDonald's, ordered the food, sat eating chicken nuggets
and Dave said, 'oh guess what, today been to see the consultant, and guess what,
I've had a scan and I haven't got any cancer in my body.'
The boys went, 'oh that's good' and continued talking about whatever they were talking about [laughs],
which was great because we didn't want to have the big celebration, 'I've done this and I'm cancer free',
because like the consultant said, if it's coming back it's coming back,
there's nothing that nothing that we can do about it.
Since then, they know that he's having check-ups every three months and so far so good.
For me, I thought the hardest part would be telling the boys that their dad's got cancer, but it really wasn't.
It was living through each day,
and you can't anticipate how someone's going to react over such a prolonged period of time.
Things change, new information evolves and different other stresses become important or less important.
Really you just have to take everything as it comes and deal at the time
the best way that you think you can deal with it.
That's the only advice that I can give. You cannot plan for what's going to happen.
Everybody worries but the worrying really doesn't make anything better.
It's to try and somehow turn that worry into a positive energy and make something good from the situation.
It's a lot harder when you're in it, I do know that,
but that's my advice: take each day as it comes.