Interview 41

Age at interview: 52

Age at diagnosis: 48

Brief Outline:

Testicular cancer (seminoma) diagnosed in 1998. No secondary tumours found, but 10 treatments of radiotherapy over three weeks to prevent recurrence.

Background:

Machine tool operator; married, 2 children.

Explains that he delayed seeking help because he did not want to be a hypochondriac.

Why did you not mention it to anybody all that time?

I just thought it would go away. I just thought it was something and nothing. It's not, I don't, I've never, when I was a child I was always ill, chest infections, asthma the lot and my mother always nagged me. And I think it bred in me the fear of mentioning anything for people fussing round. That's, and I went to work and all those illnesses left me behind you know I left them, I hardly had any you know of those serious illnesses like I'd had before, odd colds and that was it. Minor injuries and very few occasions went to the doctors over the years. And I just, it's just something in the back of my mind that I didn't really want to discuss it and it would ago away and that would be it. You know I wasn't going to be a wimp, you know a hypochondriac or whatever you want to call it.

Explains that his family has found it hard to come to terms with cancer.

The biggest problem I've had is not me coming to terms with this is my family coming to terms with it. Because we've had major problems with everybody else in the house since, with their reaction to it. May be it's because they can't laugh or you know ease the situation in some way, to them it is much more serious. It's that I'm, it's probably the way I look at a funeral, a funeral isn't for the dead it's for the living, it's for the living to come to terms with the death. The dead don't bother, they've, to me the dead aren't there they, they aren't any part of it it's the people left behind. And the same thing works with illness. When my mother had Alzheimer's it was all the people around her that were upset, my mother didn't know a thing. And I think that you can sit down and you can think oh well I'm coping with this and it isn't till a year afterwards you realise that you might be coping with it but you've not looked at all the people around you that are thinking more about this than you are. 

And in the end I had to get support for my son and daughter from other sources, you know through the doctor. Because I realise now, they were worrying more than I was.