In July this year, Lucy and I will have been married for fifteen years. We were together for ten years before that. Twenty-five years, more or less, of being on the same page — about life, about what we wanted, about how we approached things and supported each other through them.
Our relationship has always been solid in a way that's easy to take for granted. Not dramatic. Not difficult. Just steady and real and genuinely good. And I suppose this — all of this — is probably our biggest challenge. The biggest thing we've ever faced together.
What strikes me, looking back, is that at no point has it felt out of control. It's crept and crept and crept and then got serious, and yet somehow we've managed to stay one step ahead of it. That's Lucy as much as it's me. Probably more.
Because what people don't see — what doesn't make it into the blog posts and the Facebook updates — is everything Lucy is carrying in the background. Not just my diagnosis, my appointments, my medications, my recovery. But her own mother's dementia, which has been deteriorating for years. Her dad, who has been the primary carer through all of it, running on empty, the relationship strained by the relentless demands of a condition that makes the person you love become someone you don't always recognise.
Lucy has been managing all of that — quietly, consistently, without complaint — while also managing me. I don't know how she does it. I genuinely don't.
Moving her mum into a care home just outside Scunthorpe a few weeks ago was the right decision. It was overdue. And it happened to coincide almost exactly with my treatment and my seizure, because that's just how life works sometimes — it doesn't space things out for your convenience. You deal with what's in front of you when it's in front of you.
The day of the move was hard. Her mum has advanced dementia now, which means she didn't remember being told. She thought she was going for a visit. She was ready to go home almost as soon as she arrived. We were advised to wait until she fell asleep and then quietly leave — which felt awful, in the way that doing the right thing sometimes feels awful. We stayed away for four or five days to let her settle into the routine.
The last few visits have been completely different. She looks well. She's eating. She's showered. She's interacting with people, smiling, present in a way she hadn't been at home. Lucy's dad goes every day — dropped off at half ten, stays through lunch, talks, looks after her, and wants to go back the next day. After five years of carrying that weight alone, he's got his wife back in a different way. And Lucy has got her parents back too.
It doesn't make up for everything. But it helps. 
Then there are the children.
Florence is thirteen, fourteen in July. Albert is ten, eleven in November.
Flo has always been quietly brilliant. Never got into trouble, always toed the line, slightly reserved in larger groups but absolutely herself — funny, warm, loved — within her close circle of friends. She's getting into music lately, which I love, and it turns out we have very similar taste, which feels like a gift. She loves food too — vegetarian, but Italian, Japanese, anything with flavour and intention — and that's something we share completely.
Albert was a challenging small child. Emotional, intense, struggled to manage his feelings. And then somewhere along the way he grew into this lovely, curious, enthusiastic boy who loves football and coding and gaming and wants to understand how everything works. He teaches himself things. He edits videos. He's learning to code. He's interested in everything. He's also a West Ham fan, which shows excellent judgement. 
Lucy tends to spend more time with Flo — the dancing, the theatre, the things they share. Albert and I have football, and West Ham, and gaming, and all of that. It splits down the middle beautifully.
Telling them was something we thought about carefully.
I don't like secrets. I don't like playing things down. And I wanted them to know what was happening — but I wanted to give them something to hold onto alongside the difficult news. So we used the word cancer. We told them what it was. And then we immediately told them about the plan — the radiotherapy, the immunotherapy, the success rates, the strength of modern treatment.
We told them I'd be tired. That I might not be able to drive. That things would look a little different for a while. But that there was a plan, and the plan was good, and we were going to follow it together.
Flo looked scared. She's older, she understood more, and for a moment I could see her processing the weight of it. Albert, bless him, was primarily focused on whether he'd still be able to play football in the garden. Which is exactly the right response from a ten year old.
They've both been incredible since.
Albert plays football in the garden by himself now. Doesn't drag me out, doesn't make me feel guilty. Just gets on with it. He's had the occasional wobble — a moment where he's wanted me to do something I can't do right now — but mostly he's just been Albert. Getting on with things. Adapting.
Flo, while I was in hospital, saw that I'd bought ingredients for pesto and decided to make it herself. From scratch. With gnocchi. By all accounts it was incredible. She rang me to tell me about it and said she wanted to make it again. Standing in the kitchen, making pesto from scratch for her family while her dad was in hospital. Thirteen years old.
I am so proud of both of them I don't quite have the words for it.
My parents still live in Tiptree, Essex — the village where I grew up, the family home where my sister Andrea and I were raised. My sister went to university in Leicester and stayed. I went to Lincoln, met Lucy, and gradually found myself further north. Mum and dad have always been happy where they are — good friends, good social life, still mobile, still driving. They've never wanted to move.
Which means there's a distance. And distance, in a situation like this, is hard.
I didn't tell them straight away. When the lump was first being investigated — when we thought it might be a sarcoma, when the biopsy was being planned — I spoke to Andrea, who'd had cysts of her own and understood the process. She agreed with me that telling mum and dad at that stage wasn't the right call.
My dad is a worrier. He'd have googled everything. He'd have been on the phone constantly. He wouldn't have slept. He and my sister are similar in that way — overthinkers, worst-case-scenario people, not through any fault of their own but just by nature. My mum is more like me — quieter, more optimistic, better at sitting with uncertainty without catastrophising. But my mum lives with my dad, and my dad's anxiety has a way of becoming everyone's anxiety. I didn't want to put that into motion until I had something concrete to tell them.
So I waited. I told them when I had the PET scan results — when I knew it had spread, when I knew what we were dealing with and what the plan was. It all came at once, which was a lot for them to absorb. But at least they had the plan to hold onto alongside the diagnosis.
They want to come up. They don't want to impose — they know we've got enough going on without hosting — so they're planning on staying at the local pub and coming to see us. I'm forty four years old. I can handle this as an adult. But that doesn't mean it's easy for them. You don't stop being someone's child just because you're grown up. And they've been good parents. Really good parents. The kind who show up when it matters.
There was a moment, in my twenties, when I made a serious mistake. Me and Lucy had split up for a while. I was in a bad place. I did something stupid — tried to recover some expenses from an employer without going through the proper channels, and it went further than it should have. It ended up involving the police. I accepted a caution. It could have been much worse.
My mum and dad were there. They helped me through it, took the pressure off, made sure it didn't define me or change the course of my life. Without them — and without Lucy, who we got back together with shortly after — things could have been very different.
I think about that sometimes. The way families show up for you in the moments that matter, without making a big thing of it, without keeping score. That's what good families do.
This is one of those moments. And they're showing up again.
I'm aware that all of this — my diagnosis, my treatment, my recovery — is affecting everyone around me. Lucy. Flo. Albert. Mum. Dad. Andrea. People who love me and can't fix it, which is its own particular kind of hard.
I feel guilt about that sometimes. I can't help it. I didn't choose this, I know that, but it doesn't stop the feeling.
What I try to come back to is this: I am positive. Not performing positivity — genuinely positive. The treatment plan is strong. The outcomes are increasingly good. The people around me are extraordinary. And we will get through this the same way we've got through everything else.
One step at a time.
