Prostate Cancer. Male Denial, and the absurdity of it all

Men don’t go to doctors. We go to garages, sheds, or pubs—sacred spaces where nothing must be spoken unless it involves timber, oil, or football. A man will discuss the death of a beloved dog with more emotional clarity than the lump in his groin. Medical consultation is, in our private mythology, reserved for catastrophic limb loss or inconvenient decapitation.

Denial, for the average male, is not a moment. It’s a system of belief. A cathedral built brick by stoic brick over decades. Our fathers taught us to tough it out. Their fathers taught them to die quietly. The cycle continues. Illness is weakness. Complaining is unseemly. Preventive care is for Americans and people who own yoga mats.

The body begins to fail, of course. Quietly at first. An ache here. A dribble there. We assume it’s just age—or, if we're particularly committed to the illusion—just the weather. That persistent night-time urination? Must be the evening tea. Or the mattress. Or the fact that one side of the bed is clearly cursed. Anything but the organ slowly strangling itself inside your pelvis.

When a partner urges us to “just get it checked,” we bristle. If she persists, we stall. If she makes the appointment for us, we go—resentfully, like a man being marched into a pottery class. We crack jokes to signal comfort. We quote obscure statistics to display control. And when the doctor dons a glove, we retreat into the last true fortress of the aging male: irony.

Once inside the machine—tests, probes, scans—we begin to perform the Ritual of Masculine Surrender. It starts with a joke about turning your head and coughing, and ends with the quiet realisation that you’ve become the punchline in your own dark comedy.

Some men weep. Others double down on stoicism. Most just sit there, nodding solemnly, trying not to vomit on the doctor’s tasteful shoes.

And still, we resist. The diagnosis arrives like a telegram from the front. The prostate—previously unknown, unsung, and unappreciated—has declared war. It’s built a fortress. It’s bringing in reinforcements. The bladder is collateral damage. Erections are taken hostage. Hope is put on long-term disability.

But even then, we maintain the illusion. We call it “a little cancer.” We say, “It’s treatable.” We compare notes with other men, like generals discussing failed campaigns. “Oh, you went the radiation route? Interesting. I opted for chemical castration and despair.”

Because to admit the full weight of it—the fear, the humiliation, the betrayal by our own biology—would be to strip away the last tattered remnants of the male fantasy: that we are somehow exempt from decay.

We are not. We are meat with delusions of grandeur.

So we bluff. We limp into the clinic, complain about the parking, and read Car and Driver while contemplating mortality. We tell ourselves we’re strong. That we’re brave. That it’s just another phase of life, like puberty, except this time everything is shrinking.

Eventually, we stop pretending. But only after it’s far too late to benefit from honesty. By then, we’ve been poked, scanned, shaved, dosed, and told—very politely—that we will never urinate like a young man again.

But don’t worry. There’s a pamphlet for that too. It’s got a photo of two smiling seniors on bicycles.

Neither one of them is wearing a nappy. You’ll find that comforting.