My medical condition is nobody's business, right?

A routine health check was followed by months of turmoil for Michael Harrison, but his experience of a prostate cancer diagnosis left him with an important message for other men

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The telephone call, when it came, was as unexpected as it was unsettling. I had gone to my local GP surgery the previous day for a routine five-year health check and now my doctor wanted to know if I could pop back in to discuss the results. Sure, I said, when can you fit me in? This afternoon, if it's convenient, came the reply.

With a sense of foreboding, I arrived at the surgery to be told that, whilst all my other markers were in range, my prostate-specific antigen (PSA) score was sky high. Anything above five is a red flag and indicates you may have cancer. Mine was 21.7. I trudged home and broke the disturbing news to my wife, Fiona, but told no one else, not even my son and our two daughters.

That was in early March 2022. Two weeks later, my body was sliding into an MRI machine at the Princess Royal Hospital in Haywards Heath, and a month after that I was back at the same hospital having a biopsy, which revealed my Gleason score to be 4+3 - meaning that I had a relatively aggressive and fast-developing prostate cancer.

The good news, said the urologist in the sunny, matter-of-fact manner in which doctors seem to specialise, was that the cancer was contained within the prostate, which meant that it was both treatable and curable. I was put immediately on hormone therapy to block my body's production of testosterone and halt further growth of the cancer. By now, it was June.