By Marc Silver, December 2006

After my wife got cancer, I couldn't be Mr Fixit. But I could be Appointment Pal, Info Finder, Insurance Company Dragon Slayer – and Lover.

When I first got the news, I admit that I blew it. It was the last Friday of August 2001. My office phone rang at around 11am. It was my wife, Marsha. Deeply distraught, she told me what the radiologist had said after reading her mammogram: "Sure looks like cancer to me."

On a scale of one to ten, with ten being truly superb and one being utterly inadequate, my response deserved, oh, maybe a minus 11.
"Ew-w-w," I said, "that doesn't sound good."

We spoke for only a few minutes, mainly about logistics (because they're a heck of a lot easier to talk about than feelings). Marsha couldn't see a surgeon until Tuesday because of a public holiday. We decided we wouldn't say anything to our two daughters (then 12 and 15) until we knew for sure, because the doctor could be wrong, right? And then I said something like, "I'll be home at the usual time."

What was I thinking?
I'm sure that question must have crossed my wife's mind.

Later, when I confessed my initial response to doctors who deal with breast cancer every day, they reassured me that it was understandable. "Men push away," said oncologist Fred Smith, "to steel themselves from any perceived loss to come."

I tried to make amends for my slow start as a breast cancer husband. I found there's a lot a man can do for his wife.

Listen Up.
"You don't need to rush in and say everything is fine," says social worker Frank McCaffrey, acknowledging that it's in the male character to want to fix everything, to offer solutions even when none may exist. "It's a time to acknowledge what your wife is feeling. A time to be quiet, to listen, to say something like, 'No matter what happens, you know I'm going to be there'."

Encouraging your wife to express her fears and feelings about her disease can actually be good for her health. In a study published in the Journal of Psychosomatic Research in 2000, psychiatrist Karen Weihs of George Washington University assessed 32 breast cancer patients. These women had had a recurrence of their cancer, and it had spread beyond the breast. Dr Weihs looked at three points: did the women report high or low levels of anxiety? Did they keep their emotions restricted or let them out? And did they live longer or shorter than predicted, based on the severity of their metastasis?

Patients with high anxiety did not live as long as predicted – but the same was true of patients who didn't express their feelings, regardless of their anxiety. This small study is a first step, Dr Weihs says, but she believes it is an indicator of the potential negative impact of chronic worry and of repressing emotions. So if you encourage your wife to share her feelings, you may be contributing to more than just her emotional wellbeing.

At first I felt my job should be to choose the top doctor and a surefire treatment plan for Marsha. But I soon came to understand that wasn't my role at all. Marsha had to select a surgeon who made her feel confident, and a surgical option that made sense both to the doctor and to her. (She chose to have lumpectomies of the cancerous tumours – she had a second lesion, in her other breast.) But that didn't mean I sat idly by. I took on the stressful fights with our medical aid, and I served as Marsha's sounding board. "If a patient has an echo, a foil, it makes it much easier, even if she may not take the spouse's advice," says Dr Fred Smith.

Flower Power
Sometimes you don't need words. I was the point person for phone calls, since Marsha, who's a teacher, is hard to reach in the classroom. One Tuesday in September, a doctor called to report the findings from Marsha's biopsy. The lump was definitely cancerous and it was bigger than we had originally thought. I dreaded telling Marsha.

On the advice of a female friend, I splurged on a gorgeous bouquet of poppies – Marsha's favourite flower. Although my wife hated the news, the flowers really seemed to make her feel better. This whole exchange was somewhat puzzling to me until a friend at work enlightened me: flowers hark back to the days of courtship, when romance was in the air, and breast cancer wasn't. They are a promise that love hasn't disappeared.

Handholding
I became Marsha's Appointment Pal. Just by holding her hand, I learnt, I could make a difference. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, researchers told 183 people they'd have to deliver a short speech about something that made them angry – a potential stressor. One hundred participants were instructed to sit with their spouses, touching them comfortably for 10 minutes, and then hug for 20 seconds, before the speech. The other 83 people spent the time alone. The study findings? During their speeches, those who had spent the time touching their spouses had blood pressure and heart rates that were significantly lower than those who had been alone.

Reminder guy
I also helped Marsha come up with a list of questions prior to each visit. I'd bring the list to the appointment. As the visit would draw to a close, I could remind her, "You also wanted to ask about this or that."
If I couldn't be a Mr Fixit, I could at least be the Reminder Guy.

Then there was the matter of remembering the doctors' answers. "40% to 80% of medical information provided by health care practitioners is forgotten immediately," reports researcher Roy Kessels, PhD, from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. Anxiety makes it worse. The Appointment Pal can help listen, make notes, or even tape-record key appointments (but if you want to do that, it's courteous to ask the doctor's permission).

Last, your mere presence can be a big comfort. I went to the casualty room with Marsha one evening for an unscheduled CT scan. (She turned out to be fine.) Staggering home after midnight from a five-hour stint in hospital, I grabbed my wife's hand. "See, honey," I said, "you can't say we never go out anymore!"

Getting wiggy with it
At the thought of losing her breasts, which was what one doctor suggested early on, Marsha was cloaked in a raw and impenetrable sorrow. She retreated into herself. I told her I loved her and not her breasts. She lashed out at me: "How would you feel if a doctor wanted to cut off your penis?"

I felt awful. I was just trying to share what was in my heart. A while later I asked psychologist Anne Coscarelli if I'd done something wrong. Her answer was no. Husbands need to understand that even loving sentiments might not blunt the initial explosion of psychic pain.

As it turned out, Marsha was able to keep her breasts – but she lost her hair during the chemotherapy that followed the surgery. I admit that I thought she was fixating on a trivial issue: the hair will grow back, I wanted to say. But later I learnt that for many women, losing a breast is not as difficult as losing their hair. A loose-fitting blouse can conceal the loss of a breast, but the bald head is such a public symbol of everything that's gone wrong. When you see a bald woman, you can almost bet that she's a cancer patient on chemo.

Anticipating the hair loss, we went to a wig shop and one of the employees gave Marsha a buzz cut. Afterwards we went to look at the selection of wigs.

You can do many things while you're sitting with your newly shorn wife in a quiet corner of a bustling wig shop. You can cry together, mourning the loss of her hair and fearing the future. Or you can hold each other quietly and whisper, "I love you." Or you can do what we did and goof around. Marsha indulged all my fantasies, trying on wigs in various wild styles: Dolly Parton, Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, a prim prison matron, a Vegas blackjack dealer. In the end, she bought a sensible brown wig that mimicked her usual style and made her look just like... Marsha.

At first she was terribly embarrassed by her hairless state and wanted to keep her wig on, even in our most intimate moments. But I told her she didn't need to be self-conscious with me. So she removed her crown of hair. With her lovely egg-shaped head, she had an exotic beauty, like an exquisite space alien.

The new normal
Marsha finished radiation, the last of her treatments, in May. We went on holiday in late June. After spending a lazy day in a small Vermont town, as the sun was setting I turned to Marsha and said, "We didn't talk about breast cancer today." We looked at each other, astonished, because we hadn't had a respite from cancer talk since Marsha was first diagnosed 10 months earlier.

We had entered the New Normal. In the New Normal, a loving and romantic Valentine's Day present is not chocolates; it's broccoli sprouts – which have been shown to be an effective weapon against breast tumours, at least ones in lab animals. In the New Normal, we have T-shirts and hats and pens adorned with pink ribbons. Our vocabulary includes words like tam-oxifen, arimidex and lymphoedema.

We try not to worry. We don't always succeed. When well-meaning people say, "They got all the cancer and your wife is going to be fine, right?" I reply, "Well, they never know for sure, but I can tell you this: Marsha is feeling good."

We've fallen back into many of our old ways and habits, slaving away at the same stressful jobs and unending parade of chores, grappling with the task of raising two lovely teenage daughters. But it's different; I'm different. I hope Marsha knows that, despite my dismal start as a breast cancer husband, she can count on me to be by her side. And when I say, "I love you," I'm not just mouthing a cliché.

One night, taking out the rubbish, I paused to look up at the dark sky, the moon and stars, and flashed back for a minute to those months when surgery loomed, or when chemo ruled our lives, and when the dark nights seemed long and lonely. Then I was back in the present, stuffing the rubbish bag into the bin, heading back inside to my wife, and I thought, It's really a wonderful life.