Colin Osborne's Cancer Fight

Colin Osborne was diagnosed with testicular cancer back in 1994 and it was a disease that almost claimed his life. But thanks to the work of a doctor at Barts Colin beat the cancer and went on to form the charity Orchid which does research into the disease as well as raises awareness.

Orchid’s ‘Check ‘em Out! Campaign’ was launched on Saturday (24 Oct) and is calling on all men and women to become more aware of testicular cancer.

So I caught up with him to talk about the new campaign and what can be done to make us all more aware of one of the most common cancer's amongst men.

- Orchid launched the Check Em Out campaign at the weekend so what is it all about?

The biggest problem with male cancer is getting men to check themselves, just going from my own experience, I had testicular cancer fourteen years ago, and the biggest problem was I did nothing about it.

I had all the classic symptoms and just did nothing about it and it was only my wife, when I mentioned it to her, made me go to my GP. I had had the disease for about six months and it had spred to my abdomen, pelvis and lungs.

With testicular cancer you can pick it up becasue the cancer is on the surface of the skin and if you check yourself regularly you are going to pick up on the symptoms earlier and the earlier you seek treatment the easier it is to treat.

The standard treatment now is an orchidectomy followed by a course of chemotherapy, and that's normally over in about three months, where as me my treatment lasted eighteen months and I nearly died so they are the true extremes.

That's why there's the need for Check Em Out it does exactly what it says on the tin if you like it's so important the earlier you pick up on it and get it treated the better your chances of survival.

- You talk about classic symptons so for people who don't know what that is what are the classic symptons?

The most classic symptom is a small lump. If you do do a regular self examination, say once a month, the best time to do it is after a hot bath of shower becasue the scrotum is relaxed and the testies should be smooth, a bit like a hard boiled egg, the only bit where it gets a bit lumpy is at the top and that's the epididymis.

Where you get a lump is on the testies so if you notice a small lump or it's different, becomes hard or changes shape; it's very common to have one of the testies a differnt size to the other one so that's normal but if you notice a change in the testies or a small lump, with me it was the lump a size of a pea and I just ignored it and thought it would go away, but it won't go away the thing that will go away is your life.

- Prostate and testicular cancer is still very much something that's not really talked about so why do you think that is? and what do you think now needs to be done to get it more into the open for want of a better word?

Well this is where the likes of you come into it just to really talk about prstate cancer has been in the news a little bit this week with Andrew Lloyd Webber being diagnosed, having sort of read in between the lines it sounds like he has been picked up early.

The problem is everyone associates this diesease with old men i.e. getting up at night and continually going to the toilet and that's becasue as men get older the prostate enlarges and that puts pressure onto the bladder giving you the feeling that you want to go to the toilet all of the time.

But also the reason that the prostate has got bigger is becasue there is cancer in there so just because you think 'I'm getting old', it might be that but it could be something more serious.

- You set the charity up in 1996 afer suffering from testicular cancer yourself so why did you go on to form Orchid?

It was basically I was very lucky. I was treated by a Professor Tim Oliver and I had the standard chemo and I went into remission, litterally for three weeks before it came back with vengence. Within the space of a matter of weeks I had tumours in my pelvis and lungs so I had the second line treatment and that didn't work, the third line tretment didn't work and then I became a guinea pig.

He developed a new chemotherapy regime that worked and I owe my life to him, this came at a time when the Lottery was just starting up and some of the bigger charities were struggling with thier funds and he lost out on a grant and he couldn't finish his research. His research saved my life so I decieded that I need ed to help and put something back in so that was the reason really just to say thank you to Tim Oliver.

- What is the role of Orchid?

We have got two parts; we fund research, we have labs at Barts in London, and also we promote awareness of all male cancers, so that's testicular, prostate and penile and we are the only charity in the UK, that I'm aware of, that does that.

We cover all male cancers and we do the research and that's expensive, we are doing cutting edge genetic research i will give you an example we have got a machine that can analyse a sample of a prostate cell to look at the DNA, and that can be done on the machine overnight. But we need to put it onto the chip and that chip costs £500 and then you have to repeat that to double check the results, so just to do one cell for one caner patient costs £1000.

The awareness side we produce a range of literature, the website, the school DVD programme called Know your balls... check em out, in which we supply a DVD. I just put myself back into that age group id you had a doctor go in there and had a serious talk with boys aged 15-16 about testicular cancer they would just freeze up in embarrassment.

So what we do is use humour and role models, we have used the likes of Jonathan Ross, Chris Evans, Phil Jupitus as well as sportman including footballer and rugby players, we have got some of the England rugby team involved. It's fifteen minutes long and it's humorous, with the likes of Jonathan Ross in there it's going to be, and it just breaks down that embarrassment they are watching a DVD, taking in and they are laughing and then they talk about it. We send that DVD, a quiz that goes with it, resource pack and that has been sent out, free of charge, to every school in the UK.

- Talking about the DVD how easy was it to get these celebrities on board and how keen were they to get involved?

It was quite easy actually as I know quite a few sportsmen, I'm quite good friends with Steve Davis and Pat Cash, and when we were prducing it Steve Davis was doing a regular programme with Jonathan Ross and I just said 'It would be great if we could get Jonathan Ross' and he just said 'Ok I will have a word with him'.

He rung me up the next day and said: 'I've had a word with him, here's him mobile number he's expecting your call' and that's how it worked. It was the same with Pat he got me Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and he also then spoke to the BBC and we got sports footage which we got from the BBC free of charge.

One of our trustees knows Colin Montgomerie I spoke to his agent and he did a bit, also the PGA have their own film company and he agreed to go an interview with them as long as he had done the filming for us. So it was actually cheap to produce becasue Jonathan Ross' bit was done when he was filming one of his programmes, so the BBC did that for us, and we have had Sky do some filming.

So all we had to pay for was two days filming where we interviewed some rugby players, so for a programme of that sort we got it at a really cheap price by just having the help of those people, no one got paid other than the production company and they did it quite cheap for us.

I know I'm biased but it's such a good awareness tool and we know that it has saved lives we know that bys have watched it and gone away and done a self examination have found a lump and have gone on to be diagonsed with testicular cancer.

Maybe it might have saved them six months or it could have been the difference between someone having the standard treatment making a full recovery and carrying on and someone like me where it took 18 months, I shouldn't be here I should have died I was that lucky. 

- So not wishing to scaremonger how common is this kind of cancer?

It's important to remeber that just becasue you get a lump it doesn't mean that you have got cancer it could be a cyst, but it is the most common cancer in young men. You are at a higher risk of gettin git between the ages of 18-32 and in the UK 2000 men are diagnosed with testicular cancer every year, that's a lot of young men.

Prostate cancer it's something like 20,000 men diagonsed with it every year and unfortunatly there's going to be 10,000 men die of prostate cancer each year, it will be the most common cancer in men. As lung cancer declines because there are less men smoking and there's not so much passive smoking anymore you will find that over the years lung cancer will decline and prostate cancer, you will find that as men live longer more will get prostate cancer.

If you were to do a biopsy on a man who has died of old age, a biopsy of his prostate, he will probably have cancer cells in there; you have two types of prostate cancer, they call it the pussy cat and the tiger, there's the very slow growing one that if a man lives to be 130 the cancer would kill him, but men don't live to be 130 so therefore just leave well alone because the treatment would be worse than the disease.

But if you go to the other end of the spectrum and have the aggressive form of the cancer and you do nothing with it you are dead within five years. So one of the research arms that we are trying to develop a test, there is what you call the PSA test that's out there at the moment but it's not accurate and it doesn't pick up if you have got the aggressive form of the benign form, so there needs to be a test that picks this up.

If that was to happen you could bring in an national screening programme but at the moment it's just not accurate enough and you can't screen for it as it would just overwhelm the NHS.     

- But testicular cancer, from a men's persepctive, as being very embarrassing and guys have an 'I don't need to go to the doctor attitude'.

Yeah. I think women are brought up, when you are younger who takes you to the doctors? Morn often than not it's your mum, and women are brought up to go along to their GP they are taught about breast cancer and the smear and they are much more open minded. So we just need to break down that taboo, that's why we do the schools programme because you have a captive audience as every young boy aged 15-16 should be at school.

I do a lot of talks at schools and I normally take a long one of he rugby players who has suffered with it we show the DVD, and do a Q&A afterwards. And we try to make it funny becasue when you are dealing with that sort of age group you need to get their attention and you need to use humour to break down that embarrassment.

- You have led me into my next question really surely the partner has a major role to play?

Oh yeah. When we do talks at school we always say to the schools, if it's mixed, to get the girls in there as well because, in the case of me it was my wife who made me go. If you look at Lance Armstrong it was his partner at the time who made him go one of the rugby players Chris Horsman, he played for Bath and he also played for Wales, it was his partner at the time who examined him and said you need to go.

Ultimately it should be down to you it's our body and we should be taking account for it we should be the ones that go but that's why we say get the girls in the talks, if it hadn't have been for my wife it would have dropped off before I would have done anything about it.

- Ok so you have been there yourself so what kind of advice would you give to men to catch it early?

Just put aside the embarrassment, the biggest problem is if you find a lump you know you have to go along to your go and he has to examine you, so you just have to slap it on the table. But at the end of the day they have seen lots of them they have seen bigger ones, smaller ones and more odd shaped ones than yours so they are not going to be embarrassed so you just need to get that mindset that it's not embarrassing.

I totally  know where they are coming from becasue it is horrible actually going along to your GP and saying 'I've got a lump', almost under your breathe, you are cringing with it but you just need to put that aside becasue, as I say, the only thing that you are going to lose is your life.

- Finally what's coming up in the future for the charity?

Obviously more awareness campaigns and we are planning for fundraisng events. I firmly believe that when we do a fund raising event that we make it fun we do do the challenge ones like Kilimanjaro and the bike rides but I do firmly believe that if you going to have people fundraising then you want them to have a good time and I think that's important and that's what we try and do.

One of the events that we do is Men In Pants and we do a sponsored walk and you wear your boxer shorts over your trosuers, I got the idea from the Moonwalk for Breast Cancer where they all wear bras, and I thought that we should be doing something like that.

It's a fun event that can be done in your lunchtime, we do it in May, and we have alot of celebrities, Pat Cash, Brendan Cole, Galdiators, page 3 girls, Bond girls. Christopher Biggins did it this year and he was a great laugh so we never know who we are going to get.

FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw

Colin Osborne was diagnosed with testicular cancer back in 1994 and it was a disease that almost claimed his life. But thanks to the work of a doctor at Barts Colin beat the cancer and went on to form the charity Orchid which does research into the disease as well as raises awareness.

Orchid’s ‘Check ‘em Out! Campaign’ was launched on Saturday (24 Oct) and is calling on all men and women to become more aware of testicular cancer.

So I caught up with him to talk about the new campaign and what can be done to make us all more aware of one of the most common cancer's amongst men.

- Orchid launched the Check Em Out campaign at the weekend so what is it all about?

The biggest problem with male cancer is getting men to check themselves, just going from my own experience, I had testicular cancer fourteen years ago, and the biggest problem was I did nothing about it.

I had all the classic symptoms and just did nothing about it and it was only my wife, when I mentioned it to her, made me go to my GP. I had had the disease for about six months and it had spred to my abdomen, pelvis and lungs.

With testicular cancer you can pick it up becasue the cancer is on the surface of the skin and if you check yourself regularly you are going to pick up on the symptoms earlier and the earlier you seek treatment the easier it is to treat.

The standard treatment now is an orchidectomy followed by a course of chemotherapy, and that's normally over in about three months, where as me my treatment lasted eighteen months and I nearly died so they are the true extremes.

That's why there's the need for Check Em Out it does exactly what it says on the tin if you like it's so important the earlier you pick up on it and get it treated the better your chances of survival.

- You talk about classic symptons so for people who don't know what that is what are the classic symptons?

The most classic symptom is a small lump. If you do do a regular self examination, say once a month, the best time to do it is after a hot bath of shower becasue the scrotum is relaxed and the testies should be smooth, a bit like a hard boiled egg, the only bit where it gets a bit lumpy is at the top and that's the epididymis.

Where you get a lump is on the testies so if you notice a small lump or it's different, becomes hard or changes shape; it's very common to have one of the testies a differnt size to the other one so that's normal but if you notice a change in the testies or a small lump, with me it was the lump a size of a pea and I just ignored it and thought it would go away, but it won't go away the thing that will go away is your life.

- Prostate and testicular cancer is still very much something that's not really talked about so why do you think that is? and what do you think now needs to be done to get it more into the open for want of a better word?

Well this is where the likes of you come into it just to really talk about prstate cancer has been in the news a little bit this week with Andrew Lloyd Webber being diagnosed, having sort of read in between the lines it sounds like he has been picked up early.

The problem is everyone associates this diesease with old men i.e. getting up at night and continually going to the toilet and that's becasue as men get older the prostate enlarges and that puts pressure onto the bladder giving you the feeling that you want to go to the toilet all of the time.

But also the reason that the prostate has got bigger is becasue there is cancer in there so just because you think 'I'm getting old', it might be that but it could be something more serious.

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