So when he started to feel discomfort in the crotch area while wearing his overalls and tight jeans at work as a marine electrician in Portsmouth, he did what any 21-year-old would do: ‘I just pushed it to the back of my mind.’
Then he found a lump. ‘I didn’t want to say anything as it was too scary,’ he says. ‘But my girlfriend, Elizabeth [now my wife], made me go to my GP.’
It was lucky she did, as Daniel was diagnosed with testicular cancer.
‘I never thought it would happen to me,’ he says, looking back to the day three years ago. ‘My 23-year-old cousin was also going through treatment for testicular cancer and I just thought it couldn’t happen to both of us. It seemed so unreal at the time.’
This month it’s Movember, the worldwide charity initiative where men (known as Mo Bros) grow facial hair to raise money and awareness of men’s health issues such as prostate and testicular cancer.
While the former usually affects men over the age of 70, the latter is more common in men aged 15-45. In 2010, there were 2,300 men diagnosed with testicular cancer in Britain.
Daniel’s GP referred him to a urologist and he went for an ultrasound and CT scan.
‘I never told anyone while I waited for the results,’ he says. ‘I felt like I had to put on a brave face. I didn’t want to upset my girlfriend any more than I had to. I’ve always felt it has been harder for my family and friends to go through than it has been for me.’
Daniel’s doctor found a mass in his right testicle. ‘Even then I didn’t think it was cancer,’ he says. ‘I just always thought it would never happen to me.’
Diagnosis was confirmed a few days before The Isle of Wight Festival. ‘I was going with all my friends but I didn’t tell them as I didn’t want to put a dampener on things,’ he says.
‘I told them afterwards and they were just as shocked as me.’
Three weeks after his first GP appointment, Daniel had an operation to remove the testicle.
A week later, doctors told him the cancer had spread and he would need chemotherapy. ‘I never thought it would get to that stage,’ he says. ‘I thought I would have the testicle off and that would be it.’
Nine weeks of chemotherapy later, the mass hadn’t shrunk enough so he endured another operation to remove cancerous nodes in his stomach, where the cancer had spread.
‘I now have a hernia from that operation and will need more surgery next year for that,’ he says. ‘They are also putting a mesh inside the stomach to protect it.’
Daniel is now in a Catch-22 situation: he can’t exercise because of the hernia but due to having had his other testicle removed when he was a baby, he now has to have steroid injections for the rest of his life, which is causing him to put on weight.
‘They think it might have been strangled in some way and died,’ he says, ‘but now, because I don’t produce any testosterone I have to have steroid injections. I’m just hoping the operation next year will be my last and I can get back to normal.’
Daniel didn’t realise until recently but losing the testicle as a baby increased his risk of testicular cancer.
‘If I’d have known I was prone to getting testicular cancer later in life then I would have checked myself more and caught it early,’ he says. ‘Maybe then it wouldn’t have spread to my stomach and I wouldn’t be in this situation now.’
But despite everything, he’s still optimistic. ‘Everyone gets dealt a bad deck of cards every once in a while,’ he says. ‘Maybe it helps to be young so I can get through this now and then live the rest of my life afterwards.’
Admitting he will be trying to grow a ‘caterpillar’ across his top lip this year in aid of Movember, he says the work the campaign does means so much.
‘It gets people talking about men’s health,’ he says, ‘and it triggers people to check themselves. Men shouldn’t be shy to tell someone if they find a lump. It’s scary but it won’t go away by itself.’
The Birth Of Movember
What started as a bunch of Aussie lads talking in a pub about their teenage heroes has turned into a worldwide campaign.
Movember started in Melbourne in 2003 and, ten years on, the campaign runs in 21 countries. Last year, more than 363,000 Mo Bros and Sistas raised more than £26million in Britain.
Globally, more than a million people raised around £92million.
‘We were reminiscing about our old heroes and realised they all had moustaches,’ says co-founder Justin Coghlan. ‘So, we decided to have a moustache-growing competition.’
The guys set some rules – all had to be clean-shaven and had 30 days to grow it.
‘We called it Movember as Mo is slang for moustache in Australia,’ says Coghlan. ‘Through word of mouth, others started to join in and the popularity spread.
‘The idea behind Movember is not just to raise money but to increase awareness of prostate cancer. If you grow a moustache for 30 days, we’ve worked out you’ll talk about it 60 times in that period.’
Let the Mo’ing commence.
The Fightback: It’s All In The Genes
Movember funds 577 projects in 21 countries. It has allowed The Institute of Cancer Research (ICR) to set up the world’s largest study into testicular cancer.
‘Finding the genes that increase the risk of testicular cancer will help us identify men with an elevated risk, ensuring the disease is caught early for effective treatment,’ says Dr Clare Turnbull (right) of the Division of Genetics and Epidemiology at the ICR.
She says testicular cancer is the most common cancer in young men and treatment has improved dramatically over the past 30 years through the use of platinum chemotherapy, which attacks the DNA of most cancer cells.
Turnbull says studies have shown the cancer is strongly genetic and understanding its DNA could help manage the disease.
Movember has been supporting research into testicular cancer at the ICR for the past two years and has begun an additional three-year programme of support.
Its support has enabled the ICR to buy a next-generation sequencing machine – Turnbull calls this a ‘game changer’ because it will help sequence more than 20,000 genes in the samples of one thousand men with testicular cancer.
‘The ongoing support from Movember is enabling us to perform really large-scale experiments and to recruit even more men to our study,’ says Turnbull. ‘Both are key to success.
