Colin Osborne's Cancer Fight

3 weeks ago 30th Oct 11:21

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.