Please welcome Thabit to Prostate Paladin, I am very grateful he is with us! Thabit, if you feel comfortable, please introduce yourself to the community. Prostate Paladin is dedicated to increasing prostate awareness for men and their families. We are doing this to help everyone know and understand the prostate and the impact it can and will have on their lives. . Please make yourself comfortable wherever you are happy. You can browse, open a post, join conversations and more. Please read the important information in the Welcome and Start Here modules in the Classroom. Introduce yourself, your community, keep us up with what is going on there. Prostate Paladin is a safe space - we do not share our stories outside of skool.

I read something this week that I have not been able to shake. A man in the UK found out his uncle's prostate cancer had come back because he saw a photograph of him in a family group chat. Nobody had told him it had returned. Nobody had told him how far along it was. He rang his cousin to get the real story, then drove across the country. What got me was not the diagnosis. It was the grandmother. She knew, and she was not supposed to tell anyone. So she carried it on her own. Somebody in most families is carrying something like that right now. Usually a woman. Usually because she was asked to. I do not think families are being cruel when they do this. I think everybody is trying to protect everybody else, and nobody notices that the protection is costing time. So here is what I want to ask you lot. Has that happened in your family, where the news travelled sideways instead of straight? And if you were the one who finally said it out loud, how did you start? https://www.skool.com/prostate-paladin-4886/about

There is a new short film doing the rounds and I think you will like it. Brooke Shields directed it. Grown children sit their ageing parents down for a serious talk, and the parents visibly brace themselves because they think it is going to be about sex. It turns out to be about getting a prostate checked. Shields described the approach as "a little humor and a lot of love", which I think is about right. She appears at the end and says she wishes she had had that conversation with her own father. He died in 2003 after years with prostate cancer. I have been going on about this for years, and it is good to see somebody with a far bigger platform say the same thing. The man is usually the last person who will raise it. The family raise it, or it does not get raised. What I keep noticing is that the fear sits with the person asking, not the person being asked. We build it up into a confrontation. He is usually just waiting for somebody to make it ordinary. So who raised it in your house? Was it you, or did he surprise you and go first? https://www.skool.com/prostate-paladin-4886/about

What did you stop doing? I read something this week I have not been able to put down. A specialist nurse in Scotland, working with men who have an enlarged prostate, said this: "Some men withdraw quietly without telling anyone why because it feels safer." Safer. That is the word that got me. Not lazy. Not antisocial. Not past it. Safer. He has done the sums - how long the drive is, where the toilets are, what happens if he cannot find one in time - and the easy answer is to say he does not fancy it this year. I would bet a fair few of you reading this have done exactly that at some point and called it something else entirely. I know I am always aware of where bathrooms are in my community and how far away from them I am at any time. So I want to open this one up properly, because this is the one place where saying it out loud costs nothing. No doctor, no form, nobody keeping score. What is the thing you stopped doing, or the thing you watched him stop doing? And has anybody ever actually asked you about it? https://www.skool.com/prostate-paladin-4886/about

I want to try something in here today, because a survey I read this week put a number on the thing this room exists for. The HEAL Foundation asked 1,036 men aged 45 and over, across five Indian states, about their prostates. Nearly two thirds of them go for a yearly check-up. Six in ten did not know whether their prostate had ever been looked at. Just under six in ten said they would be uncomfortable raising it with a doctor, and only about one in six would bring it up themselves. And then this. In the same survey, 48 per cent said family or friends influenced the first conversation they ever had about prostate cancer. Almost half. Influenced by somebody else. That is not a nice idea about community, that is the mechanism, measured. Which makes this room worth more than I thought it was. Most of you are here because of somebody. A husband, a dad, a brother, a friend who said something in passing. So here is my question for the thread, and please answer it even if your answer is dull. Who said it to you first? Who was the person who made the prostate a thing you could say out loud? I will go first in the comments. Then tell me yours. And if you have never had that person, say that too, because that is the more useful answer. https://www.skool.com/prostate-paladin-4886/about