The other night my husband said, “Sometimes, when I’m in another part of the house, I hear you cry. It makes me feel sad because I don’t know what hurts. And I don’t know what to do.”

Naturally, hearing him tell me that made the tears flow all the more. It was such a beautiful thing for him to say.

How do I tell him that the tears are not so much about what hurts? There is still some pain remaining from my cancer surgery. It stems from the area under the left arm where the lymph nodes were removed. As I work to regain full mobility in the arm, pain shoots from the inner elbow to the shoulder. But that gets better every day. It’s not why I cry.

How do I tell him that it’s more about fear of the unknown? What will the chemicals used in chemotherapy do to the good cells in my body? Will there be permanent damage? How sick will I be? Will the radiation treatments that follow shrivel the targeted body part like a prune? The recommended five-year hormone treatments sound lethal. Will they give me uterine cancer or osteoporosis?

How to let him know it’s about loss of control? It’s about giving up half a year of one’s life to fight a disease, then changing one’s lifestyle forever to keep it in check.

How to tell him it’s about feeling like an alien on the planet? Marked. A leper.

How to tell him? Instead, I blurted out, “I don’t want to lose my hair.”

His response was as I’d expected. “It will grow back.”

Yes, of course. It will.