At that word I feel bile rise in my throat—an involuntaryreaction I can’t control, and I run to the bathroom and throw up in the toilet. He hears and tries soothing me. “Hannah, are you OK?”
“No,” I say as if he’s crazy. “Of course not.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “I shouldn’t put this on you.”
“I want to know. I want to…help,” I say stupidly as I slump to the bathroom floor.
“Thanks,” he says.
A moment of quiet passes and I put my hand into my hair and pull at my scalp and then release it.
“Three days,” I say. “And then when will they start the—” I can’t even say the word.
“Chemo,” he says. “A few weeks after. I have to recover from the surgery and then I have to go bank some sperm.”
I frown, blink a few times. “Bank sperm?” a voice that doesn’t sound like mine asks.
He laughs, “Yeah, I know. It’s a precaution but…I might need it, should I ever want to—y’know—have kids.”
“Fucking hell,” I say again. I can’t stop swearing. I feel sick and I’m trying to keep the tears at bay. I’d expected this man to be here, in my sitting room. And he’s still in Texas, in a hospital, sick. I try to take a deep breath, approach this pragmatically. “I’m going to ask you what I can do. But I know I can’t do anything from here.”
“You can just be you. Just…be you.”
“I can be that.”
“I’m sorry,” he says quietly.
The tears fall freshly down my face. “What for?”
“For this. For what was supposed to be the start of us…not being the start of us.”
“Davey,” I say with a sigh and I can’t see anything because my eyes are full of tears.
“I gotta go. If I call you later…” he says.
“I’ll pick up.”
“Thanks,” he says. “Bye, Hannah.”
“Bye, Davey.”
When he hangs up, I pull great heaving, racking breaths in and out of my body and realize that not knowing what had happened to him was far better than knowing.
—
I spend all night on the internet. At first I use my phone, but the small oblong screen isn’t moving fast enough between pages and I move to my laptop, opening up Macmillan Cancer Support and Cancer Research UK, the NHS pages and forums of men discussing their diagnoses. I read stories similar to Davey’s of fit young men who suddenly get struck down by this shock. They make light of so many things, but it feels like false bravado. Between the lines I can see they’re scared. Davey must be scared. He said shocked, but now I think it has to be fear.
I feel so useless here, when he’s there. I can’t do anything. I can’t be anything more to him than I already am. My job is to wait, to encourage, to talk when he wants to talk. I send him a message telling him this, and Davey sends back a note telling me not to worry, that he’s sure he’ll be fine.
I look at the stages of cancer and am reassured that the prognosis in this case is generally good, when caught early. I put a lot of stock in that. But the next day I’m floored when Davey calls again and tells me he has something called a non-seminoma—I write it down, I’ll look it up later—and that “it’s spread. It’s in my lymph nodes.”
Inside I’m crumbling. But outwardly, for him, I say “OK,” aiming for pragmatic. “What does that mean?”
“It’s in my chest. But not in my organs. So I’m Stage Three.”
I feel bile rise again. “OK,” I say.
“So…not Stage Four,” he says positively.
