One Irish father was diagnosed with terminal cancer after he noticed he needed to go to the toilet more during the night.
1 in 6 men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in their lifetime, statistics show.
John Wall, a father-of-three from Clare, was diagnosed with cancer five years ago. He decided to make the trip to his GP after he noticed that he’d been making a lot of trips to the toilet during the night.
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“In my case, it would have been frequent urination at night. I was getting up a lot at night. I associated [that] with middle age. It wasn’t,” he said.
It took three trips to the GP for John to receive his diagnosis of advanced metastatic stage 4 prostate cancer.
Upon his first trip, John was told he was “too young” for age profiling as he was in his mid-forties. Instead, he had a blood test with a PSA test, which specifically looks at an antigen in the prostate.
He said: “If it’s elevated, it’s an indication there may be something wrong. Mine was super elevated. But because I was the age I was, it was assumed it was prostatitis, an inflammation of the prostate.”
After a few months, John went back and got another PSA test done. His levels were still high and had increased from the last time he went.
He told Tommy Bowe and Muireann O’Connell on Ireland AM that he went back a third time with a pain in his leg that he thought was sciatica. John said: “There were red flags all over the place.”
That day saw John go from the GP with a pain in his leg to scans in the Galway Clinic within the space of a few hours. There, they knew straight away that something wasn’t right.
Despite having gone through all of the precautions and still having not received the correct diagnosis, John said that he didn’t feel the need to be angry.
He said: “For me, there’s no point in regretting or looking at the past and what could have been. What I can do is live in the here and now and make the most of life as it is, as what has happened.
“That’s important to me, to not lament the past but look forward to the present and the future.”
John recalled telling his family the tragic news, and said he felt “numb in the extreme”. However, like everything they have to deal with, they got through it with “black humour”.
“There is nothing off limits. You think it, they will say it. I couldn’t say it live on air,” he joked.
The late HPV campaigner, Laura Brennan shared some advice with John that he still lives by today. He said: “I got advice from a good friend of mine many years ago, ‘live your best life’. It’s very simple but it’s very, very profound. It works.
“I’m not dying from a terminal illness, I’m living with a terminal illness,” John told the hosts of the breakfast show on Virgin Media.
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