Keeping a cancer diagnosis to yourself is one of the most common things people do, and almost nobody talks about it. There is a stretch of hours, or days, between the moment you find out and the moment anyone else does. That gap is its own kind of lonely.
THREE DAYS IN A MOTORHOME
My friend Dan Green read his scan results on a Friday evening. His wife was fifty yards away, up at the house with the grandkids. He did not go and get her.
On Saturday he drove to his daughter's house and worked on her car, because he had said he would. Sunday passed. He told his wife on Monday morning, and even then he did it gently, suggesting she might like to come along to an appointment rather than announcing anything.
Three days.
WHY KEEPING A CANCER DIAGNOSIS TO YOURSELF FEELS LIKE STRENGTH
Here is what I want you to notice, because it is the part people get wrong about themselves afterward.
Dan was not hiding. He was protecting. His family was already six weeks into his grandson's brain tumor, and his first thought when he saw his own results was not about himself at all. It was, in his words, "What in the world am I gonna tell my family after all they've been through?"
That is love doing the calculating, not fear. And it is why keeping a cancer diagnosis to yourself feels so much like the strong, decent thing to do. You are the one who holds this family together. You are not about to drop something this heavy on them before you have worked out how to carry it yourself.
Almost everyone I talk with on this journey did some version of the same thing.
WHAT IT COSTS
But there is a reason Scripture keeps circling back to this.
In Ecclesiastes it says that two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their labor - and then it gets very plain: if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow, but woe to him that is alone when he falleth, for he hath not another to help him up.
Woe to him that is alone when he falls. Not because being alone is a sin, but because there is nobody there to reach down.
Dan learned what keeping a cancer diagnosis to yourself really costs, and he says it better than I can. Being alone sometimes is fine, he says - but do not fall for the lie that it is fine all the time. God did not create us to be alone. That is why He created Eve.
Aloneness was the very first thing in all of creation that God looked at and called not good. He fixed it before anything had gone wrong at all.
IF YOU ARE STILL SITTING ON IT
Maybe that is you tonight. Maybe you got results this week and you have not said a word, and you are rehearsing how to tell somebody without wrecking their day. That is what keeping a cancer diagnosis to yourself actually looks like from the inside.
You do not have to tell everyone. You do not have to make an announcement. You do not owe anybody a speech.
Tell one person.
Pick the one who will not try to fix it, and say the sentence out loud to another human being. That is all. Most people find that the first telling is the heavy one, and everything after it is lighter than they expected.
And if you genuinely are not ready yet, that is not failure and it is not disobedience. Dan needed three days. Some people need three weeks. God is not standing over you with a stopwatch.
YOU ARE NEVER ALONE
Here is the part that is true whether you have told a single soul or not. You are not actually alone in that room. Jesus already knows, He has known since before the scan, and He is not waiting for you to find the right words before He starts helping.
Sometimes all we have to do is turn our head ninety degrees to realize He is standing right there beside us.
If you do not have that relationship with Him, or if yours has gone cold or weak or angry, please visit our Accepting Jesus Page. Nothing else on this site matters as much.
You are NEVER ALONE. Never.
Listen to the Podcast - Dan's Story, Part Two: I've Never Asked God Why