‘I had to tell my kids the surgery hadn’t worked’

The prospect of telling loved ones about a cancer diagnosis scares many patients – but help is at hand, says Matilda Head

Receiving a cancer diagnosis is life-shattering, no matter your circumstances. It is a moment that Clare Davis-Eaton, 48, will never forget. “All I could think of was my kids,” she says. “That they’re both at uni and I haven’t seen them graduate, that I haven’t met any grandkids yet.”

In 2016, a lump in her neck was diagnosed as squamous cell carcinoma, a form of skin cancer. At the time, her children Dominic and Georgia-Louise were just 21 and 19. Clare had never been married to her children’s father and recalls that it had always been “the three of us against the world”.

Though she realised her children needed to know about her diagnosis, Clare felt an overwhelming dread at the prospect of telling them. Eventually she asked her mother to break the news. “I didn’t know if I’d brought up strong enough children to deal with my emotions and theirs at the same time,” she says. When she did face them, her children were supportive but Clare recalls “their words weren’t matching up to the reflection in their eyes; they looked scared, angry, sad, lost. As a parent you protect your children, I couldn’t protect them from this hurt. I hated the domino effect on my family.”

Michaela Waters’ son, Mekhi, was just eight when she was diagnosed with thymus and later thyroid cancer. In January 2021, Michaela had recovered from a bout of Covid, but could not shift her cough for almost a month. After she began suffering breathing difficulty she went to A&E where doctors found a tumour in her chest.

“I think I was still in denial at the time,” says Michaela. It was only when Mekhi arrived home from school that the enormity of what she was facing hit her. “He came in and ran towards me for a hug but my mum had to stop him: I was still radioactive from the scan I’d had. It hit me like a freight train: I’ve got cancer and at some point I might never be able to hug this little boy again.”

The conversation with Mekhi would have to be handled carefully. The only thing he knew about cancer was that “people go bald”. When Michaela told him about her diagnosis, Mekhi’s first question was “Are you going to lose your hair?”

As her treatment began, finding the right method to discuss the treatment was vital and Mekhi had his own ideas. He suggested they watch a favourite programme of his, Alexa & Katie. “I’d never heard of it,” Michaela says, “but he explained, ‘Alexa’s got cancer and she’s lost all of her hair and you can tell me if you feel the same way she does.’ At that moment, I knew I’d raised a trooper.”

Watching the Netflix series allowed Mekhi to ask questions. “We talked about how it felt to be bald; he’d ask if I felt how those characters did, and whether I’d start wearing wigs,” she recalls.

Once her own diagnosis was out in the open, Clare also strove for radical honesty with her children during her six weeks of daily radiotherapy and weekly chemotherapy. She invited Dominic and Georgia-Louise to her treatments too, “to show them that I was OK, that I was coping,” she recalls. “I wanted them to see the reality, to give them some comfort, to see that Mum’s all right, she’s got off the bed and walked out of the session.” Clare’s children also took an active role in her care, washing her hair, driving her to appointments, and running her feeding machine when radiotherapy on her neck left her unable to swallow. But while she aimed for complete transparency about her treatment, Clare found it much harder to open up about her feelings.

“I’d bottle it all up because they’d already been through so much. They’d seen me looking rough, not managing – so to tell them that on top of all that, you’re also struggling inside your head, it felt awful,” she says. “They wanted me to tell them everything, because how can they help me if I don’t tell them, but I didn’t want their help. I felt that my job as a parent was to support them, not the other way around. I felt like I was robbing them of their best years.”

The fear of letting down their family weighs heavily on the minds of cancer patients. Macmillan research found that over a quarter of patients admit they’re scared of breaking the news to their families (a subject the Macmillan support line offers help and advice on), while 35 per cent of people with cancer describe not being able to be there for their family as one of their greatest fears when they are first diagnosed.

Having been a single mother since Mekhi was seven months old, these concerns were particularly acute for Michaela. “When you’re ill as a single mum, their world stops because you are their world and it’s hard to watch that,” she says. “You feel like a failure, you feel like everyone else is looking after your child except you.”

It was Mekhi himself who was often able to shake Michaela out of these depressive episodes. “He has an amazing level of empathy and emotional intelligence,” she says proudly. “On the days when I was really sick, he would come in from school, crawl into my bed and read me stories.”

When she was having a particularly hard time with chemo, Mekhi would care for her, tucking her into bed when she could not do the same for him.

The surgery to remove Michaela’s tumour was originally scheduled for Sept 2 but she requested it to be moved so she could see her son’s first day of Year 4. “We took quite a few photos and I remember looking back and being like, although I didn’t display it, I was scared,” she says. “I’d become more scared of surgery than I was of chemo, because chemo kills the cancer, but with surgery, so many things could have gone wrong.”

Communicating the inevitable ups and downs of cancer treatment was something Clare struggled with too. In November 2016, doctors could find no evidence of cancer, but by mid2019, just as she and her family had started to put their life back together, she found another cancerous lump in her neck.

This time, Clare told her children the news. “We’d been through so much, and I owed it to them to maintain the openness that had got us through the first time,” she explains.

Clare underwent a full neck dissection to remove the tumour but the treatment wasn’t successful. “I had to tell my kids the surgery hadn’t worked. I needed to get my head round what I was going to tell them if there was nothing more the doctors could do,” she says.

The doctors offered more radiotherapy with the caveat that there was a 20 per cent chance the radiotherapy itself could kill her. Thinking of her kids, Clare went ahead with the 80 per cent chance it wouldn’t – a decision, she admits, that Dominic and Georgia-Louise were concerned about. “Whether it’s 20 per cent or 2 per cent, the kids fear they’re going to lose you; we had to have a lot of discussions about it,” she says. Thankfully, the surgery was a success and after three and a half weeks in hospital, Clare was able to join her children at home for a quiet family Christmas. “I didn’t care if I had beans on toast for dinner, I was having Christmas with my kids.”

As of mid-2020, Clare is in remission, and now volunteers as a facilitator for Macmillan’s HOPE course. Inspired by her example, Georgia-Louise has followed her mum’s footsteps to work in the social care sector. Her only regret about how she navigated her diagnosis is not breaking the news to her kids the first time. “I wish I’d given them the respect,” she concedes. “I took the chicken’s way out. But we got through it together. It educated the kids not to take anything for granted, to open their eyes and be more empathetic.”

Likewise, Michaela’s surgery was successful, and she too is in remission. She has made up for lost time with Mekhi by taking him on the travels they’d dreamt about during the darkest days of her treatment. They have been to Jamaica, Greece, Spain and Portugal, and are hoping to visit Switzerland before Christmas. Mekhi’s biggest worry now that his mum is all right is that he does not want her to return to work. “He’s always been a breakfast club and an after-school club child, but we don’t need to do that anymore and he loves it,” she says. “I’m just so grateful to be able to be a mum again.”

‘I wanted them to see the reality, to give them some comfort, to see that Mum’s all right’