When I come out of urology centre, I burst out crying. I got emotional. All those things
that you hear from other people about why me. All those emotions just come flooding in.
My name is John Brasio. I was diagnosed with prostate cancer at 44. It was caught early,
localised, left hand side of prostate and I had surgery removing and now three years in remission.
I was diagnosed with one of the symptoms from that you get from prostate cancer which I found
out afterwards was a urine infection. The tests I had done were first of all for diabetes and
eventually over a period of five, six months, eventually we referred to urology centre to get
checking my bladder and my bowels as well and then waited three weeks for results and found
out I had prostate cancer. When I got diagnosed I realised there was quite a lot of options
out there for prostate cancer when it was caught early. Even though I was advised of the best one
for me, there was quite a lot of other treatments out there, radiotherapy, chemotherapy, hormone
treatment. I mean with prostate cancer now I realise that with early diagnosis it's trivial.
I set myself little goals and little steps and I could only do one thing at a time. The first
thing I had to do was actually say to work cancer and once I got the grips with that I knew
that I could do another step. When I was recovering I got involved in a prostate cancer UK pilot
programme called Get Back on Track. The programme consists of a series of phone calls with a specialist
nurse. It's designed to help men like me deal with fatigue. The calls help you plan both daily
and weekly diaries and identify the times when you're most likely to suffer from fatigue. Then
the nurse helps you develop strategies for dealing with those times so if you have a busy week you
might learn to structure things differently and have some me time as well. Your friends and family
and colleagues at work don't really understand. It's not like being tired or how you feel when
you don't get a good night's sleep. It's really debilitating. It wipes you out. I know from speaking
to other chaps it took part in the Get Back on Track pilot that until they put a name on it,
the symptoms of fatigue sometimes made them worried that cancer was coming back. That's one of the
great things about the programme. Realising that fatigue is just a normal part for coming from
cancer. I feel good about myself and the lessons I've learned. It's just unfortunate that I have
to be diagnosed with cancer to learn those lessons. I was quite fortunate in my journey because I had
good consultants, good clinicians, good assistants but that's not a case across the board when you
hear other patients. So if it was good for me, it should be good for everyone else. So I put that
in place and do anything I can to help. That's what I try to do.
