PROSTrATE CANCER by Graham Sharpe

Author:Graham Sharpe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-12-13T15:20:40+00:00

19

IN WHICH I AM BRUISED BY NURSE GEMMA’S BLOODY DESTRUCTION

YOU MIGHT think that being signed off by your oncologist would be the end of your worries… but when I contacted my travel insurance providers to tell them the good news, they congratulated me – before telling me they’d be charging an additional £358 to cover me for our next trip abroad, which was to be to New Zealand to see our elder son, his wife and our granddaughter in August 2019. Thanks, PC, that’s about a grand you’ve already cost me in additional travel insurance costs.

We’d just returned from some time in Jersey, which we love, but where I’d suffered from a few stomach and bowel-related incidents. I had also decided that radiotherapy had changed my palate. Meat dishes, in particular, were now generally absent from my personal menu. It was time for my next Zoladex implant (as I had now learned was the correct terminology) – which turned out to be a bloody one…

‘Sorry about that,’ said Nurse Gemma, ‘you’ll have a bruise.’ She then told me she’s leaving the practice.

‘No wonder you were a little gung-ho with the needle, then…’

Within days we were wide awake in Petone, just outside New Zealand’s capital, Wellington, still wrestling with the effects of jet lag, but very excited at seeing our soon-to-be three-year-old granddaughter, Georgia.

I was reading The Sunday Star-Times, a Kiwi newspaper, which featured a full-page advertisement launching a ‘Blue September’ campaign, with a big ‘Go Blue for Our Boys’ heading alongside a photograph of a half-dressed man wearing jacket, shirt and blue tie, but on his bottom half – only blue boxer shorts and blue socks.

Blue September is the Prostate Cancer Foundation NZ’s (hereafter PCF) annual awareness and fundraising campaign.

‘Join me in the fight against prostate cancer’ pleaded the ad, explaining that the disease ‘kills over 600 men each year’ in the country, while ‘eight men are diagnosed with this terrible disease every day in New Zealand’. The figures also show that some 3,000 New Zealander men are diagnosed annually with the disease – a number which has been heading upwards in recent years. A story in the same paper said that an amazing 90 per cent of those quizzed, in a survey of more than 500 PC survivors, said it was ‘helpful when making a decision (about treatment) to speak with others who had treatment’.

Still in Kiwiland for our 45th wedding anniversary in late August, I spotted an item on Australian TV about an Aussie Rules match being played to raise awareness of PC, between two teams of former star players.

A few days later I was concerned by my ongoing inability to enjoy food and drink, which had never previously been a problem. I was, by now, wondering – even worrying – that the change might be permanent. I’d hate having to admit that I was becoming any kind of vegetarian, having always dismissed it as even a remote possibility!

When I’d returned home, I checked out the website for

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