After losing Debbie to breast cancer, Phill’s story shows why we shouldn’t forget the men who are left behind
My wife Debbie and I were married early. She was 21, I was 22. We had five kids. We moved into running our own businesses when I was 25. She was my finance director and she ran the finance and HR of our businesses. Over the next 25 years, we set up seven businesses, bought two and sold eight. I spent the whole of my career with my wife as my business partner, instrumental in all of our businesses.
One day, she gets out of the shower and makes a phone call to the doctor. She had found a lump. She went to the doctors, and they said, “You need to go to the hospital now.” It was very quick. It was a matter of a day or two between finding the lump and going to the hospital and then a month before the biopsy came back and they said that she had breast cancer.
They told her she had triple-negative breast cancer. To be honest, we didn’t really understand the different types. We moved forward, and she had a very large lump at the back of her breast. She had chemotherapy from August through until Christmas. They then operated on her breast between Christmas and New Year, a left breast mastectomy.
The diagnosis and her treatment were rough because it’s difficult to watch somebody you love go through that sort of treatment. But it was always with optimism, and we pretty much carried on with life as usual. Debbie still stayed at home, the kids still got themselves to school, and she insisted on cooking the food because she liked doing that for the family.
She mostly walked the dogs, and when she wasn’t feeling up for that, she got the teenage kids to do it. She didn’t go as much to church, and we didn’t go out and do stuff, but life in the house just continued and potted along in its own way. For me, it wasn’t that difficult because I was always looking forward. I had no comprehension of anything other than this being a rough year or two.
She found the operation tougher than I did. I just accepted the fact that she’d chosen not to have a reconstruction of her breast at the same time. I think that was partly under advice because it was such a big lump and it was let’s get through this and then she’ll think what she wants to do about that later, but it made her feel maimed and disfigured. She felt I would never love her quite the same way again, but that wasn’t true for me.
After Christmas, we started to go to radiotherapy, and all seems to have worked fine. Then the hay fever season started. She’s sniffling a lot and struggling a little bit with her breath. Our daughter came home from teacher training in London and said, “Mum actually does need to see a doctor.”
On the Monday morning, I tried to ring a local surgery and couldn’t get through, so I rang 101 and they put a triage nurse on the phone with her. They decided to send an ambulance. At 10:00, an ambulance turns up, and one of the ambulance drivers said we don’t really know why we’re here, and the other ambulance driver said everything seems fine. But when I take her oxygen mask off, her heart rate goes up. I’m not happy with that, so the paramedic decided we should take her to hospital just to be on the safe side.
So Monday 12:00, we’re arriving in Winchester Hospital and they start doing tests. She stays in overnight, then they move her to the ward behind A&E, and they carried on doing more tests. On the Wednesday, they had about five different sets of consultants come round, looking at bones and lungs; she had some X-rays and she had an MRI on her lungs. And Thursday at 2:00 p.m., a whole team of consultants turned up, led by the oncologist, who said I’m very sorry to tell you, but you’ve got Stage 4 terminal cancer.
We thought in February she was getting well, but now they were going to put her in palliative chemotherapy starting Friday. I went home on Thursday and told her parents that she was terminally ill. I called for my daughter, who is in London, to come home. Debbie’s brother was flying in from America on the Saturday anyway because it was their parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. The rest of my family lives locally, and I talked to them on Thursday night and said on Friday we would set up for them to see her. Those who were working took time off work. Those who were in school took time off school, and we took the kids, and they all had a one-on-one or two-on-one time with their mum on Friday afternoon.
I stayed with her on the Friday night until about 11 o’clock and drove home. The next morning, I was up early, and driving into the hospital, and the phone goes and I’m told to come to the hospital straight away. I turned up and she’s struggling to breathe. She recognised that I was there, but she was deteriorating quite badly.
It looked to me like she’d had a stroke and was drifting in and out of consciousness. They called for the crash trolley, and I said to the lead nurse, “Can I talk to you?” I walked away because she’s kind of conscious, and I didn’t want to hear this part of the conversation. “So she’s dying, isn’t she?” And she said, “Yes.”
I said she wouldn’t want resuscitation. I said, “she had two beloved dogs. And when they got ill, there was no way that she was going to let them get to the point of suffering. She would rather have them put down than watch them suffer. So if that’s how she felt about her dogs, that’s how she’s going to feel about this.” I repeated this to the resuscitation doctor, then I went back in and held her hand, and within about the next 20 minutes, she died.
I was still running two firms at the time and doing a master’s degree as well, so I was too busy to do anything to support myself. And as a bloke, there isn’t that much support out there. Females are engaged with doctors at a very early age. You know, contraception, child-birth and stuff. Males are not.
Women have a female fraternity around them, which men don’t. You don’t talk about it at work very much, especially if you’re in a leadership position, so you lead quite an isolated life.
There was a lot of support for Debbie, but there was nothing for me. When she died, there was this frenzy of activity. Everyone’s shocked, sending flowers, turning up at the house. And then a couple of days after her funeral I didn’t get contacted by anybody else almost ever, because all the relationships were around my wife in the village. So it was silence. It was absolute silence.
About 12 months later, the doctors’ admitted they should have contacted me six weeks after she died to check I was all right, but they didn’t. Anyway, it’s my job to support the family, my in-laws had lost their daughter, her two brothers had lost their sister, my kids had lost their mother. As dad and husband, it was my role to support them all. And through grief, some in the family ended up blaming me for Debbie’s death and their reaction to it, which led to fragmentation and arguments. So, I was pretty much just left on my own to get on with it.
I had not cooked for 20 years. With my two sons who were at home, we had to sit down and the one who had just come back from uni said “I can cook.” But I wasn’t having that, so we agreed that we all would share the cooking two nights each per son and three nights a week, with Sunday lunch being one of mine. We ended up looking for a new recipe every week and then we share the recipes and we decide what we like. I think the three of us still cook many of those meals, to this day.
The August after she died, I was just about to start a new job at the university, and I thought I’d go on to buy some new clothes, but I hadn’t bought clothes for 25 years. I’m walking around Marks and Spencer and a very kind woman came up to me and I said, “my wife used to buy all my clothes. She just died. So I don’t really know what size I am.” She took me and she showed me the labels and she said “now go to the changing room, take your clothes off and write down the numbers and then come back out and we’ll sort you some clothes out.”
In my case, one woman with breast cancer negatively impacted nine lives for the period of her treatment and beyond after she died. So a diagnosis of breast cancer impacts everybody around the woman, or in some cases, the man.
Now, the interesting thing is when you say ‘don’t forget the men,’ that’s also ‘don’t forget the sons.’ My daughter was panicking about whether this is hereditary, and daughters and mums tend to be closer so they feel it in different ways. But the boys were pretty isolated from that, and to watch this happen to their mum affected them too.
I have always been reasonably fit. A few years ago I started to be a regular at a gym, then I decided to start running in December 2022. I used the Couch to 5K app and within three weeks ran a 5K Park Run in sub 30 minutes. Then I ran 10K races and a half marathon as well, all leading up to running the London Marathon.
I chose to run for Against Breast Cancer as they are doing the research needed to prevent and provide a cure for this horrid disease, and I ran the London Marathon in 2024 for Debbie. It was my way of honouring her, and highlighting how breast cancer affects entire families. For every woman diagnosed, there are husbands, sons and fathers trying to hold things together. We need support too.
But life does go on, it’s fair to say that I lost the love of my life, who was the centre of family life and my business partner too. I mostly held it together, but knowing what I know now, I could have dealt with things in a better way. The best I can say is that we were all grieving. Eight years on, I have made a success of my new career, have a stable and fulfilling relationship with my family and a new relationship, all of which make me so very happy. Supporting the men who are left behind after breast cancer isn’t about pity or charity. It’s about helping them to heal, regroup and rebuild.