At the moment that Emma Butcher was told that she had breast cancer, her husband Nick burst into tears. Emma remembers this; Nick, the epitome of the strong silent male, doesn’t. “I really can’t remember a great deal about that meeting, except that there were hordes of people there,” he says. “I don’t recall crying, but I was very upset. For Emma more so than myself. She seemed to take it in her stride at the time.”
As any professional involved in the care of breast cancer patients will tell you, there is no right or wrong response to the disease. But what has become clear is that just as patients can benefit from support and sometimes advice, so can their partners. For this reason the charity Breast Cancer Care has just published a booklet, In It Together, which specifically addresses the needs of partners facing a diagnosis of breast cancer. It offers information and advice on coping with the fallout from the disease, including the strain that breast cancer can put on a relationship.
“Partners can be equally affected in their own way,” says Dr Emma Pennery, a nurse consultant with Breast Cancer Care. “It can be difficult to know how to behave around the person who has breast cancer. Partners can feel confused by the balance of showing their own emotions and reacting to what’s happened, while being supportive. If partners feel supported, they will probably help the person with breast cancer, and reading about their situation in the privacy of their own homes gives them information without them necessarily having to act on it.”
Nick and Emma Butcher live in Cardiff with their 11-year-old son, Sam, who was 6 when Emma found a lump in her breast just before her 30th birthday. Within a month she had a lumpectomy, and then began eight months in which she had chemotherapy followed by radiotherapy. Nick, resolutely positive by nature, was pleased that her treatment started quickly, but admits that the speed of the medical processes left him reeling with a sense of helplessness.
“At the beginning I felt like a passenger,” he says. “You’re sitting on a rollercoaster and you can’t get off, you’ve got to ride it out. Everything is on hold, it wasn’t in my control at all. I suppose I was a good passenger — I wasn’t complaining about the ride, I was just going along with it and doing whatever I could to make things as easy as possible for Emma.”
This was made more difficult by his work as an IT consultant in Bracknell, which kept him away from home during the week. So that he could drive home and take Emma to hospital at any time he gave up alcohol. “I feel that I can deal with things better if I’m rational and pragmatic, rather than by worrying,” he says. “I don’t think, ‘I have to be strong’, I just am. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not interested and that I don’t care.”
Emma, an employment lawyer and now a breast cancer counsellor, is familiar with Nick’s practical and unemotional approach. He gathered information on the internet, he shaved her head when her hair fell out and, crucially, he made it clear that her bloated and bald appearance was no less attractive to him.
“I would have been more self-conscious about my appearance if Nick had reacted to it, but his attitude towards me didn’t change at all,” Emma says. “Knowing that Nick still found me attractive gave me an underlying feeling of confidence. In many ways, that man’s-man attitude — the pragmatic approach he took, the fact that he never worried about me going to die, that he never fell to pieces — was very reassuring to me.”
That said, Nick acknowledges that the nine months of Emma’s treatment were sometimes distressing. “The worst times were after the chemotherapy and she was on her hands and knees in the bathroom throwing up. I felt so helpless,” he says. “What do you do? Stand there and pat someone on the back? Then you feel guilty that you’re patronising them. You just offer all the support that you can.
“There were times when I probably got quite cross about it. We row and shout at each other like everybody else does, and that carried on. You don’t stop reacting to each other as you normally do when somebody’s ill for that length of time. At first you tread very carefully, you think about what you’re saying, but when it becomes part of daily routine for six months everything goes back to how it was.”
He is not, he says several times, the kind of guy who needs a shoulder to cry on — he deals with his emotions internally and feels no need for them to be minutely examined. So when, as happened throughout Emma’s treatment, her breast cancer nurse made it plain that she was there to support both Emma and Nick, he was reassured that help was available should he need it.
Such support for partners was not available 18 years ago, when Sheila Angel’s breast cancer was diagnosed, and the experiences of her husband Michael show that it can be valuable. Sheila, a volunteer who works with children in schools, was then 43, Michael, a financial adviser, 47, and their three children were teenagers.
“After the diagnosis one has to take on everything in a short time, from trying to continue to work and the full responsibility of helping with the children, and trying to run the house,” Michael says. “But the day doesn’t expand beyond 24 hours and there’s an awful lot on your shoulders. You feel very inadequate and isolated. Nothing prepares you for it.
“I felt obliged to be positive all the time, and that was one of the hardest things over many weeks when Sheila was feeling that she wasn’t going to come through. She was very down and depressed, and angry about having contracted breast cancer. Who’s the person who’s always the butt of the anger? The person that’s there all the time. It’s not personal, but it’s directed very personally.
“So you’re trying to keep yourself on an even keel, your family on an even keel and your partner on an even keel. And it’s very hard when there’s nobody there to pick you up. I didn’t really talk to Sheila about how I felt because I was trying to reduce the pressure on her and didn’t want to burden her any further.”
Today the Angels live in North London, where Sheila and Michael have both become volunteers at Breast Cancer Care. Michael supports other partners, providing the help that he wishes had been available when he needed it.
“You’re a listening post on the telephone,” he says. “It’s an outlet that enables people to pour out their concerns and worries to somebody who has been there and who can reassure them that the problems they’re facing are not unique to them. They’re not failures because they’re finding it overwhelming, and they need that reassurance. I would have benefited a lot from that myself.”
In It Together is available from Breast Cancer Care,
helpline 0808 8006000;
www.breastcancercare.org.uk; info@breastcancercare.org.uk
