RIGHT GENTS, IT’S TIME TO ...GET YOUR

John’s warning

If you are a man who experiences the urinary symptoms associated with prostate cancer and you avoid going for the test because it’s embarrassing, you’re a fool.

That’s what grandfather John Morgan thinks. And he should know – for he runs the Lanarkshire prostate cancer support group, which meets at Maggie’s Centre in the grounds of University Hospital Monklands.

An unlikely set of circumstances led to John, now 75, making a GP appointment and starting the process that would eventually lead to a diagnosis of prostate cancer.

When he retired from his job as an officer at Shotts Prison, he wasn’t yet ready to put his feet up and so trained as a driving instructor.

One of his students in 2005 was an Iraqi doctor working with NHS Lanarkshire; in one lesson, he picked his student up from work and the pair drove just a few miles before John was “caught short” and had to stop and make a dash to the toilet.

Towards the end of the lesson, they stopped to fill the car with fuel – and the doctor noticed that his instructor made another visit to the loo after paying at the kiosk.

John recalled: “He asked if that happened a lot; I said, ‘I think I have a bit of a weak bladder.’ It had been a running joke when we were on family holidays and dad was always running to the loo.”

When they pulled back up at the GP’s workplace, John’s student turned to him and said: “You Brits can walk into a hospital at any time. You do not realise what you have in the NHS.

“It is free. You can walk in and be treated. Tell me what the doctor says when you phone him in the morning.”

Dad-of-two John, then 63, took his student’s advice and made that call. “I was very lucky,” he says; “my doctor was clued up but even now, many GPs are not.

“Some dismiss the possibility of prostate cancer because they think a patient is too young. I explained I was passing water frequently and could hardly last an hour without the urge to go.”

His GP carried out a rectal examination – a procedure in which the doctor inserts a finger into the rectum.

“It’s the only test there is to check for an enlarged prostate,” explained John. “That is the reason men don’t go to their doctor – the embarrassment of that test.”

Within 10 minutes, the examination was over and blood had been taken to measure the level of prostatespecific antigen (PSA) protein, which is produced by normal, as well as malignant, prostate gland cells.