The most heart-wrenching test a wife’s love could face
Doctor Lucinda offered to check her husband’s test results – and saw he has terminal brain cancer. In this extraordinary testimony, she says it’s made their marriage even STRONGER
Sitting in my office as the scan uploaded onto the screen, i could only watch in horror as the image unfolded before my eyes. How i wished, in that brief moment, that i had no idea what the lines and shadows flickering on my monitor meant. it would have bought me a few more moments of blissful oblivion.
But as an oncologist, i couldn’t take refuge in medical ignorance. My years of training gave me no choice but to instantly interpret the image. it was of a viciously aggressive brain tumour, terrorising the patient’s brain.
i began to shake. it didn’t matter that, as a 45-year- old cancer doctor, i’d had years of experience of breaking bad news to patients.
What made this so different was it wasn’t a scan of one of my patients. it was an image of my husband, Adam. My wise, witty, lovely husband; the father of my three children.
He’d come to my hospital for a Ct scan after suffering recurrent headaches — and, because the other doctors were rushed off their feet, i thought i’d look at the results.
i’d expected to see nothing. instead, i saw a glioblastoma, the most aggressive form of brain tumour, which has an average survival time of just 15 months. As the tears cascaded down my face, a voice inside my head roared: ‘My life is over! My life is over!’
Outside my office, i could hear the rattle and hum of hospital life. But inside, my world was shattering into a thousand pieces as my life as a doctor, wife and mother collided horrifically.
How was i going to tell Adam? How would i explain this to our children?
At that moment, a nurse came into my office and somehow i managed to explain what had happened. Meanwhile, in a side room, Adam was waiting for me, bli ss fully unaware that our lives were about to change for ever.
i knew there was no point in getting a second opinion. the results were incontrovertible, the prognosis desperate. i had to tell Adam. Surrounded by kindly colleagues whom the nurse had summoned to my aid, i somehow composed myself.
We’d come to the hospital on the morning of May 15 last year to eliminate rather than confirm there was anything ‘nasty’ about Adam’s recent headaches.
After all, he was a fit and healthy 44-year- old lawyer who seemed to fizz with life. He’d been this way ever since i’d met him, through friends, 20 years before.
What’s more, there were no textbook symptoms to suggest even the remotest possibility of a brain tumour. Adam had no co-ordination issues, no numbing on one side of his body. there had been no red flags.
the first sign that anything was wrong was when Adam started experiencing episodes of nausea in February 2014. He’d also get headaches when he was tired.
Our GP in north London, where we live, suggested they were tension headaches, which i thought made sense. Adam had just started a new job as a corporate lawyer, and it could be very stressful.
But on May 14 last year, he came home from work with a particularly severe headache, so i rang a colleague at north Middlesex Hospital where i work and arranged a Ct scan the following day.
We went to the hospital together, and i left Adam waiting for the scan while i went off to do my clinic. i can still see him, in his suit and crisp white shirt, drumming his fingers impatiently, desperate to get to his office.
An hour or so later, he texted me to say he’d had the scan but no one had come to give him the results.
i knew the department was busy and that it was likely they hadn’t been assessed yet. So, i thought it would be quicker to look at the results myself. that way, i could let him know all was fine and he could get back to work.
Except it wasn’t fine. it was the kind of brain tumour that couldn’t have been mistaken for anything else. it grows quickly, moves fast, and i s deadly. i had too much knowledge even to attempt to deceive myself.
Having composed myself, i called my brother who is a professor of oncology i n Leeds and who researches brain tumours. He immediately leapt on a train to be with me. then i told Adam. there’s no textbook way to break bad news. When i have to do it for my patients, i make sure they aren’t on their own, and i assess how much information i think they can take in.
But how do you tell your own husband? A man who knows you better than you know yourself?
Somehow, though my legs threatened to fold under me, i went into the side room, sat down, and told Adam the scan had revealed something and that it was serious. He looked at me, slightly dumbfounded.
‘Well, how serious?’ he asked. it took every iota of strength to drag out one single word: ‘Very.’ then i explained about the tumour, though i held back from saying at that stage it was likely to be terminal.
Despite the chaos raging inside me, we sat hugging each other and saying very little. Because of my
‘It was a viciously aggressive tumour. I began to shake’
‘We sat hugging each other and saying very little’
job, we couldn’t indulge in one of those conversations which others grasp at, about doctors ‘not always getting things right’. I had seen the f uture on that scan and i t was unremittingly bleak.
After that, things moved quickly. A consultant colleague came in to confirm what I’d told Adam, after which he was referred for another scan which would be shown to a neurologist. Meanwhile, part of me went onto auto-pilot, telephoning Adam’s parents, close friends and our nanny. I became almost inured to breaking the news.
When Adam’s parents arrived, it was mid-afternoon so I went to collect our youngest, five-year-old Thea, from school. I wasn’t ready to tell her or our older two — Jonah, 12, and Sacha, nine — anything other than Dad wasn’t well and was in hospital.
I remember getting home and having a glass of wine, then playing ‘horsey horsey’ with Thea, thinking how surreal it was as she rode on my back, giggling uncontrollably.
After further scans, arrangements were made f or Adam t o have surgery at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in London to remove the tumour the following week.
But I knew his was the kind of cancer that always leaves microscopic bits behind. That’s why it’s almost impossible to cure. So even though Adam would have the operation, I knew it was stalling the inevitable.
He wasn’t allowed home but spent the weekend at the neurological hospital in Queens Square. We passed the time in a kind of eve-ofwar bubble. Family and close friends came to the hospital, and since the weather was lovely we sat outside in the sunshine. If only it had been possible to suspend belief, but I couldn’t be an ostrich. Anyway, Adam is immensely practical and I had to stay in step with him.
Telling our children was heartbreaking. I waited until we were together for dinner a few days later and then told them ‘Daddy had cancer on the brain’ and that the doctors were doing all they could.
My youngest one didn’t really understand but my elder two were very upset. Inside, I kept thinking ‘My poor, poor children’, yet outside I had to be strong and tell them the doctors were wonderful people — which they are — and would fight to do what they could.
The surgeons removed as much of the tumour as they could see, and Adam recovered astonishingly quickly from the operation. At first he was tired, slept a lot and took painkillers, but because he was otherwise fit, he was running in Highgate Wood three weeks later. We even managed a trip to Center Parcs in Woburn.
On the outside, he was my bright, cheerful husband. As a wife, I wanted to accept that I had him back, this precious, vital man who was at the centre of my world. But as a doctor I knew the odds: only five per cent of people who have this kind of brain tumour survive.
Six weeks after surgery, Adam started six weeks of radiotherapy. Meanwhile, he found his own way to cope, jotting down thoughts on his treatment in his own poignant, brutal yet darkly humorous way.
It was both comforting and gripping to read, and as he pressed on his thoughts grew into a book, Pear Shaped, which he went on to selfpublish on Amazon. It has really encouraged him how well it is being received, and what amazing reviews he is getting for it.
After finishing radiotherapy, Adam began a form of oral chemotherapy which involved taking tablets every day for five days once a month. I held back from trying to act as his doctor, but I helped him on practical matters such as how to take anti-sickness tablets.
In October, Adam even went back to work. From the start, there had been an unwritten code that we had to start l i ving again, that we couldn’t just wait for the cancer to claim his life.
In December, Adam and I even managed to go to Marrakech for three nights. But when we got back, he was horribly sick and started suffering from headaches. We both suspected the worst, but it turned out he had just picked up a bug.
Adam finished chemotherapy in March and the scans are currently clear. I don’t allow myself to indulge in a fantasy that he’s been cured: what Adam has is almost certainly incurable and I am brutally realistic. There are no magic cures.
The irony is that, at the moment, Adam rarely gets headaches or feels sick. If I wasn’t a doctor, I could kid myself this has all been a bad dream.
But it isn’t, though we don’t waste time discussing his mortality. We do normal things, be it crashing out in front of the telly, enjoying family days out with the children, or seeing friends and family.
When Adam had his 45th birthday a few months ago, he wondered if it would be his last. I had no idea what to say when he told me. Instead, the two of us went to a beautiful Indian restaurant, and spent it as any loving husband and wife would.
It’s not easy. But I fight with every fibre to stop myself plunging off that cliff.
Living with a man who is dying has changed me — as a wife, mother and as a doctor — though one consolation is, I hope, for the better. I’ve always been dedicated to my patients, but now I have another layer of understanding.
I know Adam and I are not alone i n going t hrough t his s ort of tragedy, and that there is no point asking: ‘Why me?’
I used to feel a little sceptical when couples said that their relationship improved as a result of a trauma. How could that possibly be?
But in our case, it really has. We’ve been tested and we’ve pulled together. We don’t argue, we focus on what matters: our children, our life, our family and friends.
I wrestle hard to stop myself thinking about the future. I don’t want to consider the possibility of my children growing up without their father. The realist in me says we don’t have long together, but the idealist prays that Adam will be one of the five per cent who beat this thing.
The only option left is to make the most of every day, and to try not to think too much about what might happen. In some ways, it’s a good way to live.
‘The only option is to make the most of each day’