On this week’s episode, we are talking about men’s health, particularly prostate cancer, and the challenges faced by our guest, John Griffith of Score Men’s Wellness. I don’t want to give away too much about the episode (you really should have a listen!), but one of the things we talked a lot about is men’s reluctance to take care of themselves physically by going to the doctor. I don’t think it’s just a male ego thing, after all, I’ve known plenty of women who put their heads in the sand when it came to their health. I denied the possibility of a diabetes diagnosis for years before the occurrence of breast cancer forced my hand. And my mother-in-law took care of everyone before she took care of herself, even after she’d had deep vein thrombosis, heart issues, and more. But men sometimes take the idea of ignorance as bliss to a new level – often a deadly one.
I have first-hand experience with this male egoic refusal to go to the doctor with my late husband, Mark. On the mildly annoying end of things, he would often get strep throat and wouldn’t go in for a check-up until he was too sick to function. In fact, on my son’s 1st birthday, I had to send a friend to pick him up from the local urgent care because he waited until that morning to go in. As luck would have it, he was stuck there during the party and was so sick he actually passed out, so they wouldn’t let him drive home. He came home and went straight to bed, missing the whole party.
He eventually started taking his health more seriously, but that still did not include going to the doctor unless he had to. He quit smoking, lost a few pounds, and developed a great habit of exercising and eating well. One of his hobbies became mountain biking, and he often went out to the local trails on the weekend for some outdoor exercise. Then he had a big crash, and he was pretty sure he injured his arm. Instead of going to the urgent care or the emergency room to have it checked out, he decided to wait and see if it got better. A few days later, when he was still in pain, he went to the urgent care and had an x-ray. They said they would call him back with the results. They never called, and he never called them. Assuming that no news was good news, he played ostrich and continued his business. But he was still in pain, and he didn’t have full use of his arm. No amount of nagging on my part would get him to call that doctor back to get the results…that is until he went to his primary care physician to get a physical for Boy Scouts. She sent him off for an MRI and to see an orthopedist. Guess what? He had torn the ligament that attached his elbow to his upper arm. It was almost detached. Months of ignoring the problem had worsened the original injury. It was quite serious and would have required surgery to repair if he’d waited any longer.
The most offensive incident was when he ignored his persistent cough. Mark had asthma as a child, and even though he sometimes still had episodes, he mostly ignored them. While most people think of an asthma attack as a wheezy struggle to get air into the lungs, I learned years ago that asthma can also present as a cough…often a persistent one. Mark coughed all the time. It was so frequent that I don’t think he even noticed it. I reminded him often to ask his doctor for an inhaler. He had an albuterol inhaler at one time, but he never had it refilled. He just ignored the cough and me. The cough wasn’t enough to bother him greatly or to interfere with his other plans, so it wasn’t worth addressing.
In June, our family spent a weekend canoeing down the Brazos River. It was a fun annual adventure for us. Mark, being the most physically fit of all of us, normally ends the weekend with little more than a bit of sunburn wherever he missed putting on sunscreen, but after this trip, his shoulder was hurting him. True to his nature, rather than getting it checked out, he decided to give it time to heal before he gave in and went to the doctor in July. I’ll skip all the details of that experience to get to my point – he had a tumor on his spine. Grade 4 adenocarcinoma – lung cancer. It had already spread to multiple areas of his spine, liver, and hip. The doctors gave him 1-5 years. He lived 18 months.
Mark often told people that he had no previous symptoms – that the pain in his neck was the first inkling that anything could be wrong. But remember that niggling cough that I kept asking him to take care of? That was his early warning sign, and he ignored it. He had smoked for 20+ years, but because he assumed it was his asthma, he didn’t think that little cough was important enough to get checked out. If he’d gone to the doctor, they might have been able to catch that tumor in his lung before it spread, and the outcome of treatment was still good. He might still be alive today. A simple chest x-ray would have done it.
Lung cancer, diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer, colon cancer, prostate cancer… these are all illnesses that can be cured, and yet, so often, treatment doesn’t come until it is too late. We avoid simple tests like a chest x-ray, a mammogram, a blood test, or a colonoscopy because it is uncomfortable, embarrassing, or inconvenient. Or maybe it is because we are afraid – we don’t want to know. Whatever the reason, it is a waste of the life we’ve been given and a disrespect to the people who love us. Is our ego more important than that? We should want to do everything we can to stick around for the people who love us, no matter how intrusive, awkward, time-consuming, or unpleasant it might be.
Mark was just 62 when he died. He likely would have had another 20 years to make music, ride bikes, canoe the Brazos, and spend time with his friends and family. Those 20 years were stolen from all of us, but they didn’t have to be. The lesson is simple – if you can’t do it for yourself, do it for the people you love and encourage them to do the same for you. Whatever it takes – don’t squander the life you have on your ego.
