A dad-of-two was diagnosed with a 'silent killer' after getting the sudden urge to urinate every 45 minutes.
Jim McDonald, 73, initially dismissed the symptom as age-related when it started in November last year, leaving him feeling "embarrassed" while at restaurants with friends. By December, he "knew something was wrong" because he was getting up for the toilet four or five times a night. He said: "If I needed to go, I needed to go, no messing around. It was quite frequent."
At his wife's suggestion, Jim went to a doctor who sent him for scans and biopsies. Just two months after symptoms first appeared, Jim was told he had prostate cancer and it had spread to his pelvic bone, "which is obviously not good news".
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As he drove home with his wife, a hearse pulled up next to them at a roundabout and the couple "burst out laughing". Jim told the ECHO: "I said to my wife, 'How do you feel about this then?' and she said, 'Well, that was sh*t news, wasn't it? But how are we going to beat this thing?'. From then on, we've just laughed even more about it and I'm very, very positive about it."
The distraught reactions of family and friends to the diagnosis sounded like they were "going to recommend a funeral director", according to Jim, who said: "What we want is encouragement, we want to be positive. We don't want sympathy."
Jim is so positive about the future that he has booked holidays in advance and recently returned from a cruise around Greece and Croatia where he renewed vows with his wife after 51 years. The grandad of four is sharing his story for Urology Awareness Month, which takes place in September to raise awareness of urological conditions like prostate, bladder and kidney cancers.
Roughly one in eight men in the UK are diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, with 47,500 diagnosed and 11,500 dying each year, according to Prostate Cancer UK. Black men are twice as likely as men in general to have prostate cancer.
It's known as a 'silent killer' because it usually causes no symptoms until it's grown enough to put pressure on the urethra, which carries urine from the bladder to the penis. The survival rate falls from 100% if caught early to 50% if it's spread into nearby organs, lymph nodes or other parts of the body outside the pelvis, according to Cancer Research UK.
Jim wonders if his cancer would've been caught sooner if there was a screening programme for prostate cancer like there is for breast cancer. He urged people to look out for symptoms of prostate cancer - including difficulty urinating, weight loss, and back or bone pain - and to seek medical help or get tested if they think anything is wrong.
The 73-year-old from Chester said: "I read an article about Bill Turnbull passing away with prostate cancer. He'd been preaching to men that they need to get tested, but the sad truth is, I'd never have read that article had I not been diagnosed with it, and that's one of the problems. It's maybe through fear or anxiety, I don't know, but men don't want to even read about it."
His own journey from the start of symptoms to diagnosis and treatment, which he hopes will "add years and years" to his life, "was incredibly quick". He said: "None of this hanging around as you hear in the news about people delayed going to the hospital. Not in our case. It was very impressive actually, and then Clatterbridge [Cancer Centre] has been outstanding, absolutely outstanding."
Jim's treatment includes an injection twice a year and "some pills every day". From October, he'll start radiotherapy once a week for six weeks as part of the Atlanta NHS clinical trial, led by Dr Azman Ibrahim, a consultant oncologist at The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre.
After joining that, he was invited to participate in a study called Ironman, the International Registry for Men with Advanced Prostate Cancer. The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre is one of the UK sites for Ironman, which is sponsored by men's health charity, the Movember Foundation. It aims to enroll 5,000 men across 16 countries, including Australia, Brazil, Kenya and the USA.
It looks at the lifestyles and experiences of people while receiving various treatments for prostate cancer. As part of it, Jim regularly answers surveys about life with the cancer, and about his physical and mental state, including the impact of the disease and the treatment's side-effects on his sleep, eating and leisure time.
His daughter bought him a t-shirt with the chemical symbol for iron on the front and the iconic March of Progress image - depicting the evolution of man, but with Ironman at the end - on the back. Clatterbridge research officer, Kathryn Hughes, also gave Jim an Ironman badge due to his "enthusiasm" for the study.
Kathryn said: "It is great that Jim is so pleased to be taking part in this study. He jumped at the chance to join when he heard it was called Ironman. We have 20 men taking part in this research at Clatterbridge. We have reached our target but have been asked to continue recruiting as we have one of the highest success rates in signing participants in the UK. It is great to know we are in partnership with research centres across the world in this important research."
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