When Megan Scott was a college senior working at a grocery store bakery, she’d unwind at a nearby coffee shop where she met John Becker, the barista. They chatted occasionally until one day, John commented on the book she was reading—wittily enough to catch her attention.

Megan later learned that John’s family created Joy of Cooking—the first cookbook she ever owned. After bonding over that coincidence, she asked him out. Their first date was bar trivia, and the rest is history. They married in 2012.

“It was glorious. Those were solid days, for sure,” John said, recalling all the time they spent camping, hiking, and even mushroom gathering in their first few years together.

But in 2020, John was diagnosed with rectal cancer.

John and Megan sat down with Health to explain what that time in their life was like and how the diagnosis and treatment affected their relationship.

You get your cancer diagnosis in 2020. What prompted you to go to the doctor and find out what was wrong?

John: We had to turn in the manuscript for [Joy of Cooking] at the beginning of 2019, and so [the time leading up to that] was just incredibly stressful. I was working full-time on the book. I was holding myself to a really high standard, agonizing over things that I probably didn’t need to or spending a lot of time with stuff that maybe I shouldn’t have. I started having kind of similar symptoms as you would with hemorrhoids, and I figured it was stress-related.

I ended up going to my primary care physician, but it took a while for me to do that. The doctor said, ‘I agree with you [that it’s probably hemorrhoids],’ and so didn’t order a colonoscopy. 

A few months later, John’s mother was diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer with metastases (cancer cells that have spread from the initial tumor site) to the liver.

John: All of a sudden, my symptoms became a little bit more interesting. My mom was making me promise that I was going to get a colonoscopy as soon as possible. 

Megan: Well, you had an appointment scheduled, but then COVID happened. And everything was locked down, and the appointment was canceled because they were canceling anything viewed as elective. But I remember kind of forcing the issue with you, like, ‘I think we should really make a case that you need to have this done. We can’t just keep waiting and waiting and waiting.’ So finally they rescheduled. 

I went into the appointment thinking, ‘It can’t be cancer.’ His mom was just diagnosed—so what were the odds?

Megan: I wasn’t allowed to go into the office [due to COVID practices], so I was waiting in the car for him to be done with the colonoscopy. And they called me and said, ‘We did find cancer.’ They knew by looking at it that it was cancer, but said they needed to do more testing to confirm. I don’t have a lot of memories of that time because I was just so shocked. I think we were both kind of in shock.

He came out to the car, and we drove home in silence. I had to get us home because I was the driver; I couldn’t be crying in the car. But as soon as we walked through the door, I cried. I called my mom, then a few friends. I just needed to talk, to tell people what had happened.

In the days that followed, John also underwent a computed tomography (CT) scan. A few days later, as the couple was on a walk in their neighborhood, they got a call from the doctor. The testing confirmed he had stage 4 rectal cancer that had spread to the liver.

Megan, after John’s diagnosis, what role did you feel you had to take on? How did you support him through chemotherapy, radiation, and surgery?

Megan: I don’t know how other people handle this kind of diagnosis. I was really upset, and I cried a lot. And then I think at some point, I said, ‘OK, we need to lock this down and just get him the care he needs, and do the treatments, and not think about worst-case scenarios or catastrophize things. I’ve just gotta be a steady, strong person and help him get through this.’

Megan: I would take off work, and I would go. I would take him to his treatment. I wasn’t allowed to go to the chemo floor with him, but I would go to his appointments beforehand with the oncologist. And then I would leave, go to work, come back when he was done with chemo several hours later, and pick him up. So I was at all of his appointments, but I wasn’t able to be in some of the spaces that I really wanted to be in, like the chemo room.

And then when he had his first surgery, I literally just had to drop him off at the hospital and couldn’t go inside. And that just felt crazy. I couldn’t be around in a lot of the situations that he was in, and that made it extra scary because I had no visibility into what was going on.

John: You were showing up. You were not complaining. You were very, very supportive.

Megan and John both had therapists they could talk to. John first started seeing a therapist before he was diagnosed, when he was having a hard time coping with his mother’s cancer diagnosis. At that time, John was leaning on Megan for a lot of emotional support. It sparked a significant conversation for the couple, where Megan had to be honest and say, “I think you need more help than I can provide.”

Megan, how did you cope with John’s post-surgery mood swings?

Megan: I think I was just listening a lot, letting you talk. And when you were having your galaxy brain moments, just being a listener for that. And then trying to reassure you when the down times came: ‘It won’t feel like this forever, it’ll pass.’ Just trying to be steady and even. Even if it didn’t feel that way inside.

John: It ended up being incredibly useful for me to have somebody to talk to besides Megan. It actually ended up making things a little bit easier on both of us [when I was diagnosed with cancer].

Looking back at yourselves as a couple before the diagnosis, what would you say has been the biggest change in your relationship from then until now?

John: This is maybe obvious, but I feel like it’s brought us closer.

Megan: Our relationship is obviously involved in this, but personally, the biggest evolution I needed to go through was when your partner is diagnosed with something like that, you sort of have to go through this mourning process for the life or future you thought you were gonna have.

John, you’ve been in remission for a few years. How has life been post-cancer?

John: It just gets better the further away you get.

Meg: I feel like we have even more confidence in our relationship because if we can get through that, everything else starts to look really insignificant and small.