Relationships and Social Isolation after Cancer

Cancer doesn't happen to one person.

It happens to everyone in the room. The partner who sat through every consultant appointment taking notes because you couldn't hold everything at once. The friend who cooked every Tuesday for three months without being asked. The colleague who covered for you without complaint and never mentioned it. The children who were told a version of what was happening that was calibrated to what you thought they could bear. The parent who aged visibly in the weeks after the diagnosis and has never quite gone back to how they were before.

All of them were in it with you. Not in the same way — being someone who loves a person with cancer is its own specific and under-acknowledged experience with its own fears and its own exhaustion — but they were in it. And the end of treatment, which feels to them like the end of the frightening part, is also a moment of transition for every one of those relationships. Some of those transitions are manageable. Some are difficult in ways nobody prepared you for. Some have already changed things in ways you are only now beginning to understand.

What this chapter does is stay with all of it. The friendships that disappeared and the specific hurt of that. The partner who is visibly relieved in a way that somehow makes your own ongoing fear feel lonelier. The children who have been different since treatment and you're not sure whether to raise it or leave it. The exhausting labour of managing other people's feelings about your cancer when you are already carrying your own. The isolation that arrives quietly and incrementally after the support bubble of treatment dissolves. And the question underneath all of it — whether the social world you had before, or something like it, ever comes back.

It also stays with the evidence. Not to be clinical about something human, but because knowing that what you are experiencing is documented and common — that others have described this in almost identical language, that it has been studied and named and is understood — is itself a form of relief. You are not alone in any of it. Even the loneliness is shared.

When friends disappear — what it actually feels like and why it happens

There is a name for it now, in the communities where cancer survivors talk honestly to each other. Cancer ghosting. The friends who became unreliable. The people who said all the right things at the beginning and then, gradually or suddenly, weren't there. The relationships that thinned during treatment and didn't recover when treatment ended. The messages that went unreturned. The invitations that stopped. The slow realisation that someone you thought of as a genuine friend has, without explanation or confrontation, simply withdrawn.

It is documented. A survey of nearly a thousand cancer patients and survivors by the American Cancer Society Cancer Action Network found that more than half — 52 per cent — experienced greater isolation as a direct result of their diagnosis, rising to 57 per cent during treatment itself. Friend relationships were the most commonly damaged — more than colleague relationships, more than extended family — even as many people reported feeling closer to their immediate household and to other cancer survivors. And the consequences of that isolation run deeper than they might appear. A systematic review and meta-analysis published in BMJ Oncology in October 2025, led by Samantha Cheng of the University of Toronto, pooled data from over 1.6 million people with cancer and found that loneliness and social isolation were associated with a 34 per cent higher risk of death from all causes, and an 11 per cent higher risk of dying from cancer specifically. Not just worse quality of life. Higher risk of death.

None of which tells you what to do with the friend who stopped calling in the third month of your chemotherapy and has not been in touch since.

The experience of being ghosted during cancer has a particular emotional texture that is worth naming carefully, because the hurt of it operates in a specific way. When someone you trusted withdraws during the worst period of your life, the meaning you make of it tends to be about you. Something in you drove them away. You were too much. You complained too much or not enough. You didn't manage your illness in a way that made it comfortable for the people around you. You must always have been too dependent, or too independent, or too something. At 3am, these conclusions feel true. They are almost always wrong.

The research on why people withdraw in the context of illness is fairly clear. They don't leave because they don't care. Most of them are somewhere on a spectrum between paralysed and overwhelmed. They don't know what to say, and the gap between what they feel they should offer and what they are capable of offering becomes so uncomfortable that distance becomes the path of least resistance. They find their own mortality uncomfortably close when they look at you. They discover, to their own dismay, that they don't have the sustained capacity for presence that a long illness requires — and rather than showing up imperfectly, they don't show up at all. They manage their fear by creating physical and emotional distance from the thing that triggered it.

This is not a defence of them. It is a description of a mechanism. And understanding the mechanism helps locate the failure where it belongs — which is with them — rather than where the frightened mind at 3am wants to put it, which is with you.

The question that follows is whether to address it. And this is genuinely a question with no universal answer.

Some people reach out. They name the gap, give the person space to explain themselves or simply to return, and find that the relationship — while changed — can be rebuilt on more honest foundations than it had before. The return is sometimes accompanied by a genuine reckoning on the other person's part: I didn't know how to be there and I'm sorry. That can be the beginning of something more real than what existed previously.

Others find that the experience of a friend's absence during cancer is not something they can move past. Not out of bitterness, or not only that, but because what the absence revealed is information about the relationship that cannot be unknown. You now know that when things were difficult, this person chose not to show up. That is knowledge about their character and about the limits of the relationship, and it is reasonable to factor it into how you hold the friendship going forward.

Both responses are valid. Both are what real people actually do. The only version worth being careful about is the one where nothing is decided — where the relationship sits unresolved in a state of accumulated hurt because addressing it feels like too much work, and months pass, and the option quietly closes. That version leaves the hurt in place without going anywhere. If you are going to carry the weight of a friendship that disappointed you, you are better off having made a decision about it than drifting.

The isolation nobody talks about — what happens after the support bubble bursts

During treatment, you were held. Not always perfectly, not always in the ways you needed most, but held. There were people checking in. There was a social intensity around you that, however complicated, meant you were not invisible. The illness organised the attention of the people around you in a way that had its own exhausting intimacy.

And then it ended. The treatment finished and the people who had mobilised around the emergency began, reasonably and understandably, to stand down. The friend who came every Tuesday started coming every other week and then monthly and then occasionally. The messages that arrived every day became weekly. The family members who had rearranged their lives around your appointments quietly rearranged them back. The system that had been watching you — clinically and socially — stepped back at roughly the same moment.

What this produces for many people is a specific kind of isolation that is harder to name than the isolation of being ill. During treatment, the isolation has a clear cause. After treatment, it sits in a social landscape that looks, from the outside, like normal life — and the gap between what it looks like from the outside and what it feels like from the inside becomes difficult to bridge.

Survivors describe it consistently, in communities where they can speak honestly, as a feeling of being out of phase with the world around them. Everyone else has returned to the ordinary tempo of ordinary life — plans, complaints, ambitions, the small concerns of people whose bodies are not in question. And you are standing in the middle of that tempo and cannot quite find your way into it. You look fine. You are supposed to be getting back to normal. The fact that you don't feel fine, and that normal doesn't feel accessible yet, doesn't have a clear social script attached to it.

This pattern has been formally studied. A systematic review and meta-synthesis published in Psycho-Oncology in 2025, which drew on qualitative research from sixteen studies covering survivors of all cancer types, found that post-treatment survivors face a consistent set of internal and external obstacles to social reintegration. The obstacles aren't character deficiencies or an inability to appreciate survival. They include the physical and psychological changes that limit social participation, an altered sense of self that makes re-entering old social contexts feel uncomfortable or dishonest, and a difficulty asking for support that the social script around finished treatment simply doesn't accommodate.

What helps — specifically and consistently, across the accounts of survivors who navigate this well — is finding at least one person who has been through it. The specific relief of not having to explain. Of being understood without translation. A 2024 systematic review of peer support interventions for cancer survivors found that peer support groups and structured social contact with other survivors specifically improved social reintegration and perceived social support. The effect is not subtle. Talking to someone who has actually been there changes things in a way that talking to people who haven't simply does not.

The Macmillan online community at community.macmillan.org.uk has forums dedicated to life after cancer. You don't have to post anything. You don't have to introduce yourself. You can read for weeks before you write a word. People post at 2am. Many of them are in exactly the state you're in now. The specific relief of reading something someone wrote at 2am and thinking yes, that is it — is available to you tonight, from this page, without phoning anyone or going anywhere.

If you would rather talk than read, the Macmillan Buddies service matches you with a trained volunteer who has lived experience of cancer — not a professional counsellor, not someone performing positivity at you, but someone who has actually been there. You register at macmillan.org.uk/cancer-information-and-support/get-help/emotional-help/macmillan-buddies and they call you first. You get weekly calls for eight weeks from the same person. You don't have to go anywhere.

If you can manage a door, Maggie's Centres are worth knowing about. There are twenty-seven of them across the UK, all located near major cancer hospitals. No appointment, no referral, no need to explain why you've come. You walk in. There are people there who understand. Maggie's also runs an online centre at maggies.org that is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

If the idea of any of these steps feels genuinely impossible right now — not difficult, but impossible — take that itself to your GP. Social isolation after cancer is a health matter, not a personality matter. Persistent difficulty reconnecting, especially when it comes with low mood or a flatness that wasn't there before, is a reason to make an appointment rather than wait for it to lift on its own.

The partner who is relieved — and what to do with the gap that creates

If you are in a relationship, the end of your treatment is also a significant moment for your partner. Not in the same way as it is for you. But significantly.

They have been in a specific and sustained state of fear and practical mobilisation for as long as your treatment lasted. They have sat in waiting rooms. They have learned vocabulary they never wanted to know. They have made practical and emotional decisions on your behalf in moments when you were not capable of making them. They have managed their own terror while trying to make sure it didn't add to yours — which means they have been performing a version of okayness for you while you have been performing a version of okayness for everyone else.

When treatment ends, your partner feels relief. Genuine, physical relief. The specific bodily sensation of a sustained threat beginning to recede. They are profoundly glad. And from where they are standing, the hardest part is now over.

From where you are standing, it may not be over yet. The fear of recurrence that Chapter 2 described has not gone with the end of treatment. The post-treatment disorientation that Chapter 1 described is still present. The physical late effects are still unfolding. You are not in the same emotional place as your partner, and the distance between you — their relief and your ongoing fear — produces something specific and painful. You are glad they are relieved. And you are more alone with the fear than you were during treatment, because at least during treatment everyone knew you were still in it.

This is one of the most consistently described experiences in the accounts of cancer survivors in relationships, and it almost never gets named early enough. It tends instead to accumulate. You calibrate your expressed experience to what your partner needs you to be. You perform more okayness than you have, because their relief is real and it feels cruel to burden it. They pick up that something is being managed but don't push, because they don't want to drag you back into the difficulty. And the distance between you grows quietly, without either of you choosing it.

The distance is not the product of a failure of love. It is the product of two people who love each other both performing versions of themselves that don't accurately reflect where they actually are, for the other person's benefit. It is a kindness that costs a great deal.

The way out of it is the conversation that is harder to start than it sounds. Not the perfectly framed conversation with all the answers pre-loaded. The one that starts with something like: I know you're relieved, and I'm so glad you are, but I need you to know that I'm not quite where you are yet, and I need to still be able to talk about the fear without worrying that I'm taking something away from your relief.

Most partners, when that sentence is said directly, respond not with impatience or disappointment but with the recognition that they already knew something was being withheld, and with relief at the permission to re-engage with the difficulty rather than perform their way past it. They were not moving on because they were done with it. They were moving on because the available information — your performed okayness — was telling them that was what was needed. Different information produces a different response. Try it.

If you're LGBTQ+

Everything in this chapter applies to relationships of every kind. But if you are LGBTQ+, there are additional layers worth naming directly, because they rarely get named anywhere else.

The post-treatment social landscape is already complicated for anyone. For LGBTQ+ people, it comes with a healthcare system that was not built with you in mind: clinical forms that assume a particular kind of household, encounters where assumptions about your body or your relationship were wrong, and a social landscape where the conversations this chapter encourages — about fear, sexuality, relationship difficulty — may face additional barriers depending on your specific community and context. Cancer does not pause those complications. Often it intensifies them.

The relationship dynamics described in this chapter do not map straightforwardly onto same-sex or non-binary relationships. The caregiving research that produced many of these findings was conducted almost entirely on heterosexual couples. If you are not fully out in all the contexts of your life, navigating cancer adds a specific additional layer: the question of how much to disclose in each new clinical interaction, whether the person you've named as your carer fits the expected category, and the particular exhaustion of managing other people's assumptions at a time when you have nothing to spare.

OUTpatients is the UK's only charity specifically for LGBTIQ+ people affected by cancer. It runs peer support groups open to people affected by any cancer type — not just certain cancers — provides resources written for this experience rather than adapted from something else, and offers advocacy for people navigating a system that wasn't designed for them. It is available at outpatients.org.uk. The Macmillan online community has a dedicated LGBTIQ+ forum at community.macmillan.org.uk — a space where you don't have to explain or contextualise before the conversation can begin. Macmillan has also produced specific information for LGBTQ+ people about cancer and navigating healthcare at macmillan.org.uk/cancer-information-and-support/impacts-of-cancer/lgbtq-cancer.

Whatever else is true, you deserve the same full account of what is happening and the same quality of help as anyone else reading this.

The specific finding about gender that is worth knowing

Multiple research studies have found that when the woman in a heterosexual relationship is the cancer patient, the risk of relationship breakdown is significantly higher than when the man is the patient. The most frequently cited is a study published in the journal Cancer in November 2009, led by researchers at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance, Huntsman Cancer Institute, and Stanford University School of Medicine. Across 515 patients followed for up to five years, the separation or divorce rate when the woman was the patient was 20.8 per cent, compared to 2.9 per cent when the man was the patient.

Those specific figures have been contested in subsequent research. Some larger population-level studies — including Norwegian registry data following over two million people for nearly two decades — found no elevated divorce rate for most cancer types in either gender. What is consistent across the evidence is the direction: when women are patients, the risk of relationship dissolution is higher. The size of that risk is genuinely uncertain. The direction is not.

The researchers' explanation relates to the different ways men and women have historically been socialised into caregiving, and the different speed at which that transition is or isn't made when a partner receives a serious diagnosis. Women, on average, are more readily able to take on caregiving roles at short notice; men, on average, less so. This is a generalisation with significant individual variation. But as a description of a documented pattern, it holds across multiple studies in multiple countries.

If your relationship has broken down during or after cancer, what remains for you is not a verdict on your worth or your future. It is a painful consequence of an already painful experience, experienced by more people than you probably know, and there is both practical and emotional support available. Relate, at relate.org.uk, offers relationship support and counselling for individuals and couples at any stage, including the aftermath of breakdown. Chapter 9 addresses the financial dimensions of relationship breakdown for those where that is part of the picture.

Managing everyone else's feelings about your cancer

This is one of the most specific and least-acknowledged burdens of life after cancer, and it has a shape that people describe with striking consistency.

You have had cancer. And in having had cancer, you have become, for the people who love you, a specific kind of emotional object. The focus of fear and relief and projection and need. People say things that are kind and well-meaning and that require a response, and the response costs energy you don't have. People tell you how frightened they were — which means you have to reassure them. People tell you how brave you've been — which means you have to perform equanimity you may not feel. People ask how you are with an intensity that makes the honest answer feel like a burden.

So you give the simpler version. You say fine, getting there, slowly. You absorb their relief and reflect it back at them. You perform the version of yourself that the people around you need — the recovering version, the grateful version, the version that confirms that the scary chapter is over and everyone can relax.

And every time you perform that version, you move a little further from being known.

This is an accumulating cost. It is not catastrophic at any single moment. But over weeks and months it produces a version of yourself that is progressively more isolated — not because people don't care, but because the information you are giving them is not accurate, and they cannot respond to where you actually are because they don't know where you actually are. The performing creates the isolation it was designed to prevent.

What consistently helps is not wholesale honesty with everyone — that would be exhausting in a different direction, and not everyone in your life has the capacity to hold what you are actually carrying. What helps is the deliberate cultivation of a small number of relationships where you don't have to perform. One person, ideally two, who get the real version. Who know that when you say fine you may not be fine, and who ask the follow-up question rather than accepting the performance.

Most of the time, the shift from performance mode to real conversation is smaller than it feels. It doesn't require a prepared speech or a structured emotional disclosure. It can start with answering how are you honestly when someone you trust asks it — not the whole weight of everything, but something true. Or with can I be honest about something? before what would otherwise be a managed exchange.

These relationships are usually found among people who have been through something serious themselves — other cancer survivors, people who have experienced significant loss, people whose own relationship with performing okayness has been disrupted by their circumstances. Or they are the people who showed up during treatment with honesty rather than reassurance — who said I don't know what to say but I'm here rather than I'm sure you'll be fine.

Find those people. Invest in them. Let them see the real version. Not as a burden but as the specific and valuable relief of being accurately known by at least one person in your life.

The carers who are also exhausted

There is a group of people in this picture who receive very little acknowledgment in any resource about life after cancer, and they are the ones who stayed. Who showed up, reliably, throughout. The partner who held the household together while carrying their own fear. The friend who came every week without fail for six months. The adult child who took time off work to be at every appointment. The parent who has been managing their terror in private because their job was to be strong for you.

These people are tired in ways that most of them have not yet fully registered. In ways they may not allow themselves to name, because naming it feels like a claim on suffering that belongs to you.

Carer burnout — the sustained physical, emotional and mental exhaustion that comes from caring for a person with serious illness — is a documented clinical reality. The Carers UK State of Caring Survey 2023, which covered nearly five thousand carers across the UK, found that 79 per cent feel stressed or anxious, 49 per cent feel depressed, and 50 per cent feel lonely. A meta-analysis published in 2023, which pooled findings from 35 studies covering nearly 11,500 cancer caregivers, found that approximately two in five — 42 per cent — screened positive for clinical depression.

The particular cruelty of carer burnout in the cancer context is the timing of when it peaks. During treatment, carers run on emergency adrenaline. There is a clear, present demand and they meet it, day after day, because there is no other option and the crisis calls them forward. The crash tends to come when the emergency officially ends. When treatment finishes and they are finally, theoretically, permitted to stand down. The problem is that a mind and body that have been in sustained high alert for months do not power down cleanly on instruction. The partner who held everything together during chemotherapy may fall apart three months after your treatment ended — not because something has gone wrong, but because the adrenaline has finally run out and everything they didn't have time to feel is arriving.

If the person who cared for you is showing signs of this — sleep problems, flatness, withdrawal from things they used to enjoy, a shorter fuse they didn't used to have — the most useful thing you can do, when you have the capacity for it, is to name it. Not as a burden in the other direction. As a genuine recognition that they went through something too, and that the relationship has room for both of your experiences.

Every adult carer in England has the legal right to a free carer's assessment from their local council under the Care Act 2014. Most carers do not know this. The assessment looks at what support the carer needs — including respite care, practical help, and emotional support — and can unlock services that make a real difference. Carers Trust at carers.org and Carers UK at carersuk.org both offer specific information, peer support, and local services for people who are or have been carers. Both are current, both are free to access, and both understand the specific dynamics of caring for someone with cancer.

Your children — what they're carrying and what helps

If you have children, the end of treatment is not the end of the conversation. It is a change in it.

During treatment, however you handled telling your children — and there is no single right way, and you made the decisions that felt right for your specific children at their specific ages and temperaments — there was a clarity of circumstance that provided some structure. Now the shape has changed. The crisis is officially over. And the post-treatment ambiguity — the anxiety you're carrying, the scans still to come, the slow physical recovery, the ways in which you are not quite yet the same person you were before — is harder for children to read than the clarity of active treatment.

What children carry, and how they carry it, varies significantly by age, and knowing which version you're dealing with changes what helps.

Younger children — roughly under eight — understand illness primarily through its impact on daily life rather than its medical reality. What they need most is not more information but reassurance about continuity: you're still there, the routines are returning, the disruption is ending. Simple, honest language is more useful at this age than detailed explanation. What you are more likely to notice is behavioural rather than verbal: clinginess, sleep difficulties, a return to younger-seeming behaviour. None of this is damage. It is a normal response to an abnormal period, and it typically settles as ordinary life reasserts itself.

Children between roughly eight and twelve are in a more complicated position. They have enough understanding to grasp that something serious happened, and enough abstract thinking to worry about it, but they often do not have the language or the emotional permission to say so directly. This age group is particularly likely to carry worry internally and protect you from it — their radar for what you can bear is sharper than you might think. The child who appears fine and seems to have moved on may be carrying more than they're showing. What helps most is not a structured conversation but repeated, low-key availability: a question asked in passing while doing something else together.

Teenagers understand what cancer is. They may have done their own research, formed their own conclusions, arrived at fears you don't know about. They are old enough to have experienced the disruption to their own lives during your treatment — the things that had to be cancelled, the parent who was sometimes not quite fully present — and they may carry resentment about this that comes out sideways. As conflict, as withdrawal, as academic difficulties the school hasn't connected to what's been happening at home. Acknowledging it directly — I know this was hard for you too, and I know things got put on hold that shouldn't have had to be — does more than trying to address the presenting behaviour.

The most consistent finding from research on children and parental cancer is that they do better when they are given repeated opportunities to ask questions over time rather than a single defining conversation, when their feelings — whatever those are, including the ones that are difficult to receive — are met with openness rather than reassurance, and when they know that the adults in their life are not performing more okayness than they have. Children are very good at reading the gap between performance and reality. They already know when something is wrong. What they need to know is that it is safe to say so.

And then there is the moment most parents are not prepared for: when the child says something you didn't know they were carrying. It might be a fear about the cancer coming back. It might be something they found online that frightened them. Whatever it is, the instinct in the moment is almost always to reassure immediately — to say something that makes the feeling go away. The research is clear that this is the wrong first move. Saying tell me more about that, or that sounds hard to have been carrying on your own, before you say anything else creates the conditions for them to keep talking. Immediate reassurance teaches them that when they say the real thing, it gets resolved and closed quickly. That is not the same as being heard.

If you are worried about how a child or teenager is managing, their school is a useful first contact — pastoral teams and school counsellors have encountered this more than you might think. Hope Support Services provides free emotional support to young people aged five to twenty-five when a close family member has a serious illness. Support is available online across the UK, and in person for those in Herefordshire. Their website is hopesupport.org.uk. The Little C Club produces flashcard sets designed for children aged two to ten to help open up conversations about cancer vocabulary and what treatment involves — they are available at littlecclub.com.

Asking for what you actually need — and why it's harder than it sounds

One of the specific communication difficulties of the post-treatment period is that the script that operated during treatment — you are ill, I will help — no longer applies, and nobody has issued a new script for what comes next.

During treatment the needs were mostly practical and mostly legible. Transport to appointments. Meals. Covering commitments. These were things people could offer without being asked and provide without much interpretation required. After treatment the needs are different. They are less practical and more emotional. Less legible and less easy to offer without prompting. You need to still be able to talk about the fear without the conversation being met with you'll be fine. You need the people around you to understand that the end of treatment is not the end of the experience. You need someone to check in about the scan coming up next month, not just about the weekend.

Most people in your life cannot read these needs without being told. They are not withholding them out of indifference. They are responding to the available information, and the available information — your management of their expectations, your performance of recovery — is not communicating that anything more is needed.

What helps is being specific. Specifically specific. Not the general I'm finding things hard, which is true but doesn't give anyone anything to work with. Something more like: the weeks before a scan are really difficult for me and I need to be able to say that out loud. Or: I'm not quite in the same place as everyone else seems to think I am, and I need to be able to say so without worrying about how that lands. Or simply: can we talk — actually talk, not the fine version — about how things are?

Small and specific asks are vastly more manageable for the people who love you than the general weight of unspoken difficulty. They do not require anyone to be equipped to process cancer. They require presence. And most people, given the chance, are capable of presence.

What to do this week

Persistent social isolation after cancer — feeling genuinely alone, without meaningful connection in your daily life, for sustained periods — is a clinical matter as well as a human one. A systematic review and meta-analysis led by Samantha Cheng of the University of Toronto, published in BMJ Oncology in October 2025 and pooling data from over 1.6 million people with cancer, found that loneliness and social isolation are associated with a 34 per cent higher risk of death from all causes, and an 11 per cent higher risk of dying from cancer specifically. If this describes your situation, please raise it with your GP or your CNS. Social reconnection after cancer is not a quality of life preference. It is part of your health.

• Macmillan online community (24 hours, life after cancer forums, dedicated LGBTIQ+ forum) — community.macmillan.org.uk
• Macmillan Buddies (matched peer support, weekly calls for 8 weeks from a trained volunteer with lived experience of cancer) — macmillan.org.uk/cancer-information-and-support/get-help/emotional-help/macmillan-buddies
• Macmillan Support Line (free, 8am–8pm, seven days): 0808 808 00 00
• Macmillan information for LGBTQ+ people — macmillan.org.uk/cancer-information-and-support/impacts-of-cancer/lgbtq-cancer
• OUTpatients (UK's only LGBTIQ+ cancer charity, peer support for any cancer type) — outpatients.org.uk
• Hope Support Services (free, ages 5–25, parent or sibling with serious illness, online UK-wide, in person in Herefordshire) — hopesupport.org.uk
• Maggie's Centres (27 UK locations, drop-in no referral, online centre 24 hours) — maggies.org
• Carers Trust — carers.org
• Carers UK — carersuk.org
• Relate (relationship support and counselling) — relate.org.uk
• Little C Club (flashcard packs for children aged 2–10) — littlecclub.com
• Macmillan guide to talking to children and teenagers about cancer — macmillan.org.uk/cancer-information-and-support/diagnosis/talking-about-cancer/talking-to-children-and-teenagers