By Owen Sharp, Chief Executive Prostate Cancer
UK
I was fresh out of college and working as a young trainee nurse
in one of Glasgow’s inner city hospitals when I first encountered
the devastating effect of prostate cancer. On a night shift, on an
all-male ward I met a man called Danny and his experience of this
vile disease changed me forever. It wasn’t his symptoms, the
side-effects he was experiencing or even the fact that he was
gravely ill that hit home. It was the fear in his eyes and the
overpowering sense that this strong, proud man was now part of a system that didn’t
care for him. That seeming indifference towards Danny, the
equivalent of shrugged shoulders and a “Well, what can you do?”
made me very, very angry.
That anger has stayed with me throughout my career – on the
wards, in the A&E departments and sitting in the boardrooms of
the NHS – and now as Chief Executive of Prostate Cancer UK I am in
the position to fight back. Believe me when I say there is no time
to lose.
This is where we stand. We have a test that divides medical
opinion and isn’t fit for purpose. Treatment options that leave men
impotent, incontinent and alone. A gland that can be as vicious as
it is silent and although awareness levels have risen, it is still
woefully misunderstood. This, in a nutshell, is prostate cancer in
the UK.
Some people say prostate cancer only kills old men. Let’s put
aside that this accusation and excuse – for this is what it is, an
excuse – is misleading, ill-informed and inaccurate, and think
about exactly what these people are saying: it doesn’t matter that
men are dying, they’re old. We may live in an ever-changing
landscape of advancing technology and scientific endeavour but this
thinking drags us straight back into the Stone Age.
10,000 men of all ages are killed by prostate cancer each year
in the UK. 40,000 new cases are diagnosed every 12 months and
250,000 men are currently living with the disease. For some, these
are meaningless figures, just more statistics on one of many
billboards passed on the way into work. But when just one of these
thousands of men becomes your grandfather, your father or even your
son, the current lack of knowledge, therapeutic limitations of
treatment and seeming indifference levelled at this disease will
hit you like a sledgehammer. With 1 in 9 men developing prostate
cancer in their lifetime, this is not an unlikely scenario. Now is
the time for us all to hit back.
Prostate Cancer UK has launched the MANifesto: a call to arms
bringing people together to support men, find answers and lead
change. Thanks to Movember we will
be spending £25 million over the next three years on research to
better predict risk, detect aggressive disease, and treat advanced
prostate cancer more effectively. But we need to go further than
this and will need your help and support. We need to fight prostate
cancer on all fronts: in parliament, in the laboratory, in the pubs
and in the minds and attitudes of men across the UK. These are our
beaches, our landing grounds, our fields and our streets, and this
is a fight we cannot afford to lose.
So, this is where we stand. This is where we stand together and
put a stop to this inequality once and for all. Men like Danny
deserve better.