A top police officer is urging people to get checked for testicular cancer after receiving a devastating diagnosis. Chief Superintendent Steve Jones was told he had cancer aged 46 after being pressured to visit his GP by his wife to get his blood pressure checked. The officer said he used this as an excuse to disclose his concerns to the doctor.
In an emotive article as part of South Wales Police's Humans of SWP series, he said he had been experiencing discomfort for some time but hoped it was an injury after being hit by a tennis ball. However, in the back of his mind he had an idea it might be something more serious.
"It’s shellshock, you know. I was praying and hoping that it was down to a trauma – I was hit by a tennis ball many, many months before – and I put it down to that. I was praying it was always going to be that. But when I actually plucked up the courage, put my big boy trousers on and went to see the doctor, I had an inkling because it had been there for so long. The thing for me is I could kick myself, how long it took me to go and sort it out and put all my embarrassment and everything else to one side."
"It was devastating to be told ‘yes, we think it’s cancer’. It took my breath away because you just focus on that one word and you don’t hear anything else after that. All the rest – the blur and the medical advice they’re giving you – is just background noise and you just think of the worst. "
Steve said he feared the worst after having the diagnosis, so much so that he started planning his own funeral and preparing his family members - despite his condition having a fairly good prognosis.
"And I certainly thought of the worst, planned my own funeral, what songs I wanted, making sure the family were okay, telling my wife where the insurance papers were and that sort of thing. Things that they didn’t want to hear. Particularly very early on when we didn’t really know what the prognosis was. And, you know, testicular cancer has a very high success rate of survival beyond five years; 98%, as long as it’s caught early enough.
"But I always had that nagging doubt I’d left it too long. Certainly, I had a secondary cancer, probably as a result of leaving it too long."
He is now urging people to get checked as soon as they have any concerns, saying that the not knowing caused his anxiety and emotions to be "all over the place." He said: "I deliberately avoided Doctor Google because you can look at things on there and I’m a bit of a pessimist – I’ve been Welsh rugby fan and a Liverpool fan for years so I can be a pessimist. So I tried to avoid that and leave it to the professionals and trust in their advice and guidance and stayed away from that as best as I could.
"But once I knew exactly what I was facing it was easier to focus. The success rates, the statistics are very, very positive. But I was in a very small statistical cohort; 1, I was 46 at the time so that was a bit of an anomaly because it’s seen as a young man’s cancer and 2, I was in the less than 10% I think it is, who require further treatment and I required the chemotherapy.
"And in my annual review at Velindre, they picked up that I had a para-aortic nodule that was deemed to be cancerous, so I had to go for further chemo and radiotherapy. But in my head I knew I could deal with it."
Steve's chemotherapy lasted 40 minutes each session and he said he was blown away by others around around him also receiving treatment who had to endure it for six or seven hours at a time. "I was sat there, you know, a big burly policeman looking around and thinking ‘I’m lucky and I’m praying for everyone in there’. So I was quite humbled going there," he said.
It has now been three years since Steve was diagnosed and despite being at high risk he is looking forward to the future. He said:" I always touch wood when people ask now, but at the moment, I’m three years into the journey, but I suppose because of the secondary chemotherapy they class me as just being two years clear at this moment in time, and I’m in that five-year window where I’m still at a slightly heightened risk. So I think five years is that magical figure which I’m looking at positively and I’m still in that cycle of surveillance, having the reassurance that Velindre are looking out for me.
"I think throughout this I feel lucky, I feel blessed. I’ve had the support of a loving family around me, it was weird during Covid but it was actually a wonderful time for us as a family on reflection because we were together and that got me through it."
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