| Harry's Story I really am glad that women talk to each other about things, especially when they make us men talk about things as well. I am married to Belinda and we live with my parents and two Labrador dogs in a chateau that we are renovating in the Dordogne. Belinda (I call her Bee) has asked me to write this down and send it in to the site. I feel awkward doing it but I've got my father's permission and if I'm too embarrassed to tell the story, that's a bad reflection on men in general who feel too embarrassed to tell the doctor about a lump they think they have found in their scrotum. My father has always been the strong silent type. He and I are both journalists and we both married journalists so when Bee and I have children, I think you can guess what they are likely to do as a future career. We moved to France in 1998 when we all decided that we could earn enough between us to fund joint retirements. My mother writes books and my father writes for a technical magazine. Bee and I are freelance and can travel back if needed but we all love our French home and are happy to make this our long-term future. In 2000, just after the Millennium, my father found a lump in his scrotum. For someone who hated personal revelations, he rather surprisingly told me what he had found rather than my mother, in a 'what do you make of this then, old chap' sort of a way while we were defrosting some pipes in the farm dairy. I asked him if it was something new or if it was his old plumbing. Ironic when you think that we were cursing old pipes at that very moment! Definitely new, he assured me, so I mentioned it to Bee who brought it up with my mother during their preparation for supper that night. I suppose you could say we all got there in the end but it could so easily have not got mentioned until too late. My mother minimised it with Bee and said that it was a young man's disease wasn't it and finally she agreed to confront him later. She did and packed him off to the doctor the next morning. I won't go into the treatment and what happened exactly. While happy for me to say that he has recovered completely thanks to the excellent, speedy response of the doctor in our local village and at the hospital where he underwent surgery and radiotherapy, my father really feels that it is undignified to reveal any more than that to the world at large. That's his generation, I suppose, they bear their treatment stoically and with calm acceptance, but it doesn't get discussed outside closed doors as it isn't 'done'. As I said in the beginning, thank goodness women talk about things and bring them out in the open. I love my father and hope to have him with me for many years to come. I saw the testicular cancer section on this site, especially the self-examination section and hope that every man or his wife reading it will immediately go and check - I had never checked myself before my father had testicular cancer but I do it monthly in the shower now and feel that I'm doing my own MOT. Harry
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