It’s Prostate Cancer Awareness Month. It’s also the month that our Marketing Associate Rob Martin was made aware that he has it. But why the need to share?
Talking about invisible conditions is one of the things we at Result encourage. Many of the people we work with have them, be they physical, neurological or otherwise. This includes our clients but also the Result CIC team, all of whom have lived experience of the issues we deal with in our coaching and training. We know all too well how masking those conditions can be exhausting, whilst openness and honesty about them can be freeing. That openness is something actively, sensitively and safely encouraged in our workshops. The stresses of masking conditions can often be accompanied by guilt when our bodies and/or minds behave in ways different to our past experiences or our expectations. Physical conditions can have an impact on our mental health, whilst mental conditions can take a toll on our bodies.
At the start of November 2024, I was out having dinner with some old friends; four women I used to work with. We’ve known each other since the 1980s.
Being with friends you’ve known for over half your life brings with it a trust and a shorthand - an ability to talk about anything. And, inevitably, as you get older, the topics of conversation often includes aches, pains, and various health issues.
Amongst our party, my former boss and my first ever ‘work mum’ told us how 'under the weather' she had been feeling. Whilst we ordered another bottle of wine, she decided to go home early and I ordered her an UBER to save her walking to the train station. Once she had left, the rest of us expressed concern about her health.
By the end of December, she had died - lung cancer - she’d had no idea she had it until it was far, far too late.
At that meal, I too had mentioned something seemingly insignificant that my body was telling me. I felt fine but I’d noticed an increasing need to pee in the night, which for me was unusual and that sometimes the need to pee would be matched with an inability to do so.
‘Go to the bloody doctor’ my friends said. So I did.
After a few months of blood tests, a CT scan, more blood tests, an MRI scan and finally, a biopsy, I sat with my consultant at the start of March.
‘There’s good news and bad news,’ he said.
‘The bad news is that you do have prostate cancer but the good news is that it’s at a very low level and you won’t need any treatment at this stage. We’ll just monitor you. If you’re going to get cancer, it’s the one to get.’
Three weeks later, the fact that I have ‘the cancer to get’ has properly sunk in. The shock of the word has subsided, it’s not the first thing I think of when I wake up or the last thing I think of as I fall asleep anymore, and life is getting back to normal, a daily tablet being my only change of routine. I have watched the worry in my husband’s face melt away, thank goodness. But I still can’t look in a mirror without thinking that cancer is now part of who I am.
As it is, and will be, for so many of us.
When I found out about my autism a few years ago, I felt like I wanted people to know, partly because it helped to explain who I am. Now, another long-term condition presents itself and so does the opportunity to ‘go public.’ But what’s to gain?
To some extent it feels a little like things have conspired to provoke it; the death of my friend coinciding with my own journey towards a diagnosis: the encouragement of my friends to just go to the doctor; Prostate Cancer Awareness Month; but also because we are too often encouraged to mask such things. Men in particular are traditionally terrible at talking about their mental and physical health, or how they feel.
It can be remarkable to see what happens when the masks fall and the authentic, sometimes vulnerable self is revealed. The strength that that brings can be life-changing.
Awareness days or months are a great way to encourage that openness, and the timing of Prostate Cancer Awareness Month is part of the motivation for me to write this article. But mainly it’s the message that I know it's tempting to resist listening when our bodies are telling us things - to take notice, to slow down, to pay attention - but I would really urge you to be open, to talk to people you love, and to go to the bloody doctor.