Don’t Give Up on Testicular Cancer

Testicular Cancer – A Story of Survival, Support and an Ice Cream Company - Episode #21

April 15, 2021 The Max Mallory Foundation - Joyce Lofstrom host Season 1 Episode 21
Don’t Give Up on Testicular Cancer
Testicular Cancer – A Story of Survival, Support and an Ice Cream Company - Episode #21
Show Notes Transcript

The correct diagnosis for Shane Kenny’s testicular cancer took almost five years. Once confirmed, he had surgery and began chemotherapy with support from his partner and fellow bartender, Sarah Pleitez. As the coronavirus shutdown began, Shane and Sarah introduced their new company...Big Shane's Ice Cream. Sarah develops the recipes (she's also a pastry chef),  and Shane approves the flavors, all designed with favorite profiles of Irish foods.  See what it takes to navigate and survive testicular cancer and begin a business at the same time.

Video podcast:  Watch the video podcast with Joyce, Shane, and Sarah on YouTube. 

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Testicular Cancer: A Story of Survival, Support & an Ice Cream Company – guest Shane Kenny with Sarah Plaitez– Episode 21


Welcome to Don't Give Up on Testicular Cancer during this month of April, which is Testicular Cancer Awareness Month. Our podcast from the Max Mallory Foundation offers insights from testicular cancer survivors, their caregivers, and others touched by cancer. We do this in memory and honor of Max Mallory, who died at age 22 from testicular cancer. I'm your host, Joyce Lofstrom, a young adult and adult cancer survivor, and Max's mom.

JOYCE: Hi, this is Joyce Lofstrom and welcome to our podcast, Don't Give Up on Testicular Cancer, from the Max Mallory Foundation. I'm your host and I'm a young adult and adult cancer survivor. And I'm really happy to welcome today two guests to share their story, Shane Kenny and Sarah Plaitez.

And we'll go from there and they have a lot of interesting things that they've been doing that I think we'll want to hear about, and I'll just give you a clue, which is ice cream, so you have to keep listening now.

So, Shane, I'm so glad you could join us. Why don't you tell us a little bit about your journey with testicular cancer?

SHANE: Hey, Joyce, how are you? Thank you for having me on this wonderful podcast. I just want to start off by saying I'm a 27-year-old male, and originally from Ireland. I moved over to America about six years ago and then about five years ago I started having a small little bit of pain in my left testicle and just kind of like in your stomach kind of pain. I just kept complaining about like, oh I'm getting very tired, oh the sharp pain is in my stomach, and I didn't really know how to explain it to anyone so I kind of just kept it to myself and until I got to a stage three--just there last year during COVID, about six months ago, I got diagnosed with stage three testicular cancer. So that was a huge shock. But like during the five years of just keeping the pain to myself, it just gradually got worse and worse to where it started going down my leg. It started going into my back. I started getting serious back pains on nights out with my friends. I kept blaming on my bad stomach because I always had bad stomach issues, but I just didn't know it was anything to do with my testicle. I went to the hospital complaining of like a cyst on my testicle and they sent me to urologist and the urologist said okay, we need to do surgery. Got surgery and then they just diagnosed me with stage 3 testicular cancer.

JOYCE: So how long did you say you waited before you went?

SHANE: This is going on probably four or five years now.

JOYCE: Oh wow. Okay. That's what I thought you said, so I just wanted to make sure.

So Sarah, why don't you jump in and just tell us a little bit of how you connected with Shane? And I know you were with him during this journey and kind of share that story.

SARAH: Hi Joyce. Thanks for having me on here as well. So Shane and I have known each other for almost four years now. We're both bartenders in New York City and mutual friends and bar neighborhoods. We just kind of crossed paths. We're now business partners. We had just started our ice cream business, Big Shane's Ice Cream, about a year ago. So that was March of 2020, right before the shutdown of COVID. And throughout everything, Shane was complaining of pains and aches. And, you know, he's had a bad stomach ever since I've known him and just kind of thought, well, maybe this is related. And so told him to go and get checked out. And so just kind of sent him on his way on his own. His family isn't here. My family's in California. So I know what it's like to be on your own far away from home. And so, you know, he went to the doctors and kind of came coming back with different scenarios. Well, they told me this, well, they told me that, you know, nothing seemed extreme. Until I remember the moment I'm sitting on my computer doing some work and text messages are popping up saying, I have cancer. And you know, you're just like, what? You just, you just went in for a checkup. What happened? You know, it was like, I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to process, and, you know, couldn't imagine him sitting at the doctors all by himself, being told that. And that's, it's literally all he could say was, I have cancer; I'm not sure what's happening. So I was like, OK, get your paperwork, come back. Let's see what's happening. So that was just kind of how, you know, it all started from there. So that was just a shock in itself.

JOYCE: Yeah, it always is.

SHANE: No matter I think who you are, but especially when you're young, I think it's a very hard diagnosis to hear. Obviously, like four years ago, I went to go get this checked out. This is a time where I didn't know Sarah. I was on my own. I was, how old? I was 22. So I was very young, naive and silly, and I was in a country that I just wasn't familiar with. I had a lot of pain four years ago. I went into urology. It's a whole taboo kind of scenario. It's involving your testicles. It's kind of like an area where it's meant to be forbidden. You're only meant to show a certain number of people. It's a weird scenario. So I was going into the doctors on my own and they just didn't know what… I kept explaining my pain and they just didn't know what to do. And they wanted to do cameras. They wanted to do a camera in through the penis. And I was like, no, no. No way am I doing that. I am not doing that. I'm 22, I'm fine, I'll get over it. And then I just pretended the pain went away for a couple of weeks. And which it did, it did. It kept coming and going, kept coming and going. Some weeks it would be my stomach, some weeks it would be my back, some weeks it would be my legs. And then four or three years ago, I mean four or three years, or four years, the pain just got crazy to a point to where I was like, Sarah, I need to go to the doctor's right now. There's something wrong here. It's absolutely fire downstairs. My leg has seized up, my back has seized up, and then that's when I finally went into the urologist and I said, I have to get this stuff done;  No matter what has to be done, I'll do it.

JOYCE: Well, it sounds…so you're saying four years ago when you went to the doctor, they didn't know what it was or what to do, which is disturbing.

SHANE: Yeah, I probably just, I'm very bad with the doctors. I go in there like a space cadet. I tell them, I always have to bring my mother in with me. I'll tell you that, which I'm kind of ashamed of. But listen, I hold my hands up. Because my mom would send me to the doctors on my own. I'll walk in and she'd be like, so what's wrong with you? And I'd be like, I don't know. Because there's so much explaining. Yeah. The doctor, they use words where you don't really know what's happening. you know, and it's kind of like, you don't really want to hear what's happening downstairs. So, I mean, I also, I got scared when they wanted to do the camera and all that. So I kind of just put it to the back of the head and carried on.

JOYCE: So then you went through chemo, is that correct too? You just finished that recently too, right, in December?

SHANE: Yeah. So got diagnosed in August and started my chemo in September. So that brought me all the way up to the last week of December.

JOYCE: Okay.

SHANE: So chemo is very tough now to be honest. I wouldn't have got through it if it wasn't for my friends, my family, and Sarah and my community. And then also just touching the subject of cannabis oils. Cannabis oils got me through chemo as I don't remember much, but I thought chemo was pretty easy with the cannabis. I did a first week without any cannabis oil, and it was probably the worst week of my life. I was vomiting. I had nausea. My fatigue was terrible. I couldn't sleep. And then when I started taking some oils, the days just got a lot easier, a lot better, a lot happier.

 

JOYCE: And I've heard that from other people, too, that the cannabis oil really does make a big difference. So I'm glad that you had that.

SHANE:  I never even knew about it.

JOYCE: Yeah, I know. There's a lot out there, I think, that would be helpful that many people maybe either don't know about or don't have access to. Or it's frowned upon as well.

SHANE: Yes, yes, that's true.

JOYCE: Well, so now we've kind of teased your ice cream company. So Sarah, do you want to start? Or Shane, to kind of give us the history of how you got going with Big Shane's Ice Cream?

SARAH: Actually, so it's called Big Shane's ice cream. Obviously, Shane is the face and you know, he's the ‘Mikey likes it or not.’ He is just, he has a huge sweet tooth. I think one thing I've learned about, you know, the Irish culture and food is you always have biscuits and cookies and ice cream and it's just a typical household staple. And that was just not in my house ever. Not for any other reason that we just didn't like sweets. It's funny as a kid, I just I didn't like chocolate didn't care for ice cream. And so that wasn't a thing for me. So we were always talking about the lines around New York City at 12 midnight, 1 a.m. You'd see a line out the door and you'd be like, what club is this? What bar is this? And it was an ice cream shop, you know, didn't matter winter, summer, any season. There was always a line. So, you know, it's just kind of a discussion. And so when Shane and I first met, I was bartending on the side. I'm a pastry chef full time. And he was like, oh, you're a pastry chef. Awesome. Can you make me some ice cream? You know, ‘I’d really love some honeycomb ice cream. That's not a thing here. I can't find it anywhere.’

And I'm like, what's honeycomb ice cream? Never heard of that. You know, me thinking there's actual honeycomb in there. It literally took me like six months to perfect this recipe. We're still tweaking it to this day. And this was about two years ago. Honeycomb is like, it's a salted caramel flavor, very popular in Ireland. And it's made with sugar, water and syrup, golden syrup. And it's just like a toffee candy that's thrown in a vanilla base and you'd get like swirls of caramel flavors and little crisps of pure sugar, pure sugar.

JOYCE: That sounds wonderful.

SARAH: So that was just kind of the start of it. It was all jokes and giggles. And then one day, I was recipe developing for a company. And so I I've learned how to mold flavors together and how to test and what to do. And so we just were like, let's do this for real. Let's, you know, kind of slowly start up an ice cream brand and see what's happening. So I got asked to open up a coffee shop with a friend behind a bar. So it would have been a coffee shop speakeasy in the back of a bar called Terra Rose in Murray Hill. And, you know, one of the things he said was, I'll sell you guys his ice cream here. So he helped kind of build our brand as well, because we were like, great, let's create some staple flavors. This was like a rush. We'll sell it here. You know, and this is right before COVID shutdown. And that's kind of the beginning. Um, but our original motto was to go business to business and make boozy ice creams and offer some obscure flavors to bars because that was our industry.

And we knew a lot of people who would use it. Um, but I'll let Shane take over, that once COVID happened, it changed completely.

JOYCE: Yeah.

SHANE: Like the initial plan, like obviously I knew Sarah was a really talented pastry chef and she made me ice cream one day. And then so I was kind of being a bit kind of funny and cocky behind the bar because that's who I am. I'm entertaining when I'm serving drinks and cocktails. I was telling people that I'm doing a little side hustle making ice cream. And this bar owner heard me, and he was like, hey, can you make me a margarita ice cream? I have a margarita festival coming up next month for my bar. And I was like, hell yeah, of course we can. It's Big Shane's Ice Cream. We can do anything you want. So I went home and texted Sarah. Yeah, texted Sarah and I was like, we have our first order for next month. We need to make two gallons of margarita ice cream. And Sarah was like, Jesus, it's not that easy. And I was like, what do you mean it's not that easy? You can do it. So anyway, we got the job done. We delivered it and it was a huge success. 

And then he just kept putting in more orders and orders. And then we were like, oh, we can do this side hustle. So then when Sarah got asked to do the coffee shop, we were like, okay, this can be where everyone can try out, like, ice creams. Because everyone was hearing that I was making ice cream but couldn't get to taste it because we weren't doing small individual ones. So Sarah opened up the coffee shop.  Big Shane's Ice Cream was about to have a launch party three days after St. Patrick's Day. I flew over my whole family, Jesus, and [it was a] fortune, because I knew I was going to go back to bar work and then make that money back. So I was like, come on, mom and dad, come on over [to] my brother and sister. And then lockdown came. And then it was just like, oh, Jesus, we had all this ice cream. My whole family went there, went home. We're sitting there at home, two weeks past, still locked down, no income. So we were just like, hey, we need to sell this ice cream, make some money. And then people were just like, whoa, this ice cream is so good. Keep selling. And that's how it happened--we just kept making ice cream and selling them on Monday, Tuesday, 200 pints a week when it was coming into the summer. So it was awesome.

JOYCE: And then I know too from the article I read that when you found out you had cancer, your community came together too and helped you distribute it to New York City as well as Queens and all around. Is that right?

SHANE: Yeah. Funny enough now, so like during all of this, Before the cancer diagnosis, I went back to work because the virus opened up again. They were doing takeaway delivery and all that. So that's when the pain started hitting me hard. That's when I went in. I said to the boss, I need to leave work because I'm in pain. So that's when I went in, got the diagnosis, went through all the chemo, kept the ice cream going. But that's when the community came together, and all my friends started helping me in to my 7 o'clock appointment, bring me home at 2pm after chemo. You're in a very bad mood when you're doing chemo, you're very tired, you're very grumpy, you're kind of hating life because your energy is just zero. It's not a nice place, so if you know anyone doing chemo, please just be nice to them, treat them well because they are liable to flip. I've flipped a couple of times, I was just like last time, my mate wanted to talk to me. When they picked me up, they were like, oh, Shane, how are you? It's so good to see you. And I was just like, ‘yeah.’

Well, my whole community, they were amazing. They sent over food. They helped Sarah out. It was unbelievable. The community in Sunnyside, Queens, mostly Irish, but Americans, they literally helped me out a lot as well. We all came through, thank God.

JOYCE: That's wonderful.

SARAH: Yeah, they would, you know, people helped us deliver ice cream. They would offer anything, you know, like, I know you're busy, you know, here's some dinner so that you can go keep providing ice cream, you know. And Shane was actually, I think his age worked in his favor at this point. But he was one week in chemo, two weeks off. And honestly, the day after chemo, he was fine. He was like, I'm great. I'm ready. Let's go. Let's do some ice cream. I want to deliver. I want to go talk to so-and-so I want to go, you know, and he threw everything was still willing and able and physically. Just wanting to do as much as he could for the ice cream. And so in that sense, the community just supported and kept, you know, sending messages and wanting to buy ice cream. Where can I get it? What can I do this? And yeah, they can't order an ice cream, didn't they? And I was like, oh, it was a good and bad thing. I was sitting there, and Sarah had to put me to work. So I'm there like after chemo and I was like, putting labels on the packaging and then falling asleep and then waking back up and doing more packaging.

Yeah, but like he did and, you know, we both did and the community, the community just in general and Queens and everybody here, we couldn't have done it without all of this support. You know, and Shane was a bartender in this neighborhood that, you know, living and selling and working and all of these things. So everyone knew who he was. And so I think just literally, he'd walk out of the apartment and people would scream like, Shane, big Shane. You know, and like, that's so uplifting. Your family's far away. You're going through chemo and you walk out your front door and you're almost a celebrity, you know, and that's like, that really helps him kind of go through everything. Um, so yeah, we did, we got a lot of community support, which is amazing.

JOYCE: So through this whole journey, Shane, and you too, Sarah, but Shane, first, what do you think was the biggest challenge in dealing with your testicular cancer?

SHANE: Coming to grips that like you have the C word, which is cancer, like that's a scary word in itself and kind of from going through the whole cancer process with the doctors and all that, the doctors can't really tell you much until they know, so at this first couple of weeks when they told me that I have cancer [and] even after surgery when they told me it was worse than they thought, like they never told me how serious or how not serious it was, they just told me that it was serious, and it's ‘cancer’ in your head [and] you're kind of thinking okay do I have a week to live? Do I have a year to live? Because that's what every person that isn't familiar with cancer thinks; they think that cancer is a killer, and it is, but it also isn't.

You know, you have to keep your head up high. You have to like keep motoring on, you have to keep positive about the whole situation and that's where I kind of struggled at the start. Like, I didn't know any information and honestly I didn't even look up any information on my phone, like I didn't sleep at night and Sarah would get on the phone and she would be like why are you not sleeping and I'd be like, I'm thinking about it too much and she'd be like, don't look at anything on your phone

Have a chat with the doctors because sometimes the phone and the information on the internet can be misleading or could be the worst information you know; so that was kind of the biggest step to get over, but then as soon as I kind of got to go ahead and as soon as I got talking to the oncologist and my urologist and he was telling me, listen testicular cancer [when gotten] is probably the best cancer you can get. And the way he said that, he was like, obviously, it's not good getting cancer. But like, the sick bay cancer is like 99% survival rate. And you got it at a good time. Like, obviously, waiting four years is a long time to be doing that; you want to [catch] it in the first year.

So that's why I kind of encouraged [others]; as soon as I got it, I told all my mates to check themselves. I told my dad. I told my whole family through a whole checkup. Like I told them to go get, like, because breast cancer is huge in my family, which I didn't know about at the start. I didn't think there was a lot of cancer in my family until I had a sit-down with my mother and I said, man, we need to look back to our parents, to our grandparents. Because my grandmother had breast cancer. My mother's two sisters had breast cancer. So it is in the family. So that was kind of the biggest struggle of getting to know what cancer is and getting to know what that cancer is in the family and how to deal with it.

JOYCE: Sarah, do you have anything you want to add to that?

SARAH: Yeah, so kind of riding on the end of his knowing your family history is a huge one--because, you know, I've never dealt with cancer in my family. And as far as I'm concerned, there hasn't been. And so Shane, as far as he was concerned, there hadn't been either. The doctors [asked] ‘well, does cancer run in your family?’ And he immediately said no. And so we talked to his mom, and he's the first male in his family to have cancer. Females are the only ones that have ever been diagnosed, and it was all breast, which is interesting to see it kind of transfer over. It's obviously a hormonal trait of some sort, if you can even specify it like that. But he was the first male, which is why he had no clue. And so even then, it was still a little taboo to talk about it. And knowing that, I don't know if he would have been a little more on top of it, or a little more willing to do certain things, or go to the doctor quicker.

SHANE: I was very naive, uneducated, ignorant about the whole situation. And that's where it comes from. I keep going back to the Irish mentality. Irish men are probably the thickest people, in the world. They're just so stubborn and just like, no, no, I'm not going to a doctor. There’re countless men in Ireland that are walking around with a limp, walking around with like, just like stuff in their stomach, like stomach problems where they just don't care because they have to go to work, and that's kind of where my fault was, because I was living check to check, because I didn't have any insurance, because I was in a country that I didn't know about. I just put it in the back of the head because my father is up at 5 o'clock every morning and it doesn't matter if he's injured or sick or anything. He's up because he has to pay for his whole family, and that's kind of where I was thinking. If I'm going to go to the doctor and if they're going to tell me, listen, you're out for a month, like that's my bar job gone, you know, so the fear of losing my job. As a person, as an Irish guy in America, it's very worrying. So that's kind of where I left that, at the back of the head. I just didn't get it sorted. But you just can't do that, guys. That's what I'm telling all my friends, my family. You just can't leave that at the back of your head because it just gets worse and worse. Yeah, and it's just anything.

SARAH: You don't really know how hard something is until you have to go through it yourself. You know, I've never dealt with any sort of cancer in my life. I've had, you know, sicknesses and different things, but never cancer. And I just didn't know anything about it. I was super naive. I had had friends whose parents had had cancer before and I and I was mortified once I went through it, that I didn't check up on somebody as often. You know, just a simple, how are you doing today? Makes such a huge difference when somebody's going through these moments. And you start to realize, who is really on top of that, and those people are saving graces. I had taken on the business on my own for a lot of the time. I was coordinating all of Shane's pickups and drop-offs. I kind of turned into almost mother bear and was like, okay, who's going to pick up Shane today and who's dropping him off?

And I think COVID was a really big one. We haven't really talked about that, but going through this during COVID, Shane had to go through it by himself 100%. He was not allowed any visitors in the hospital. Fortunately, they did allow me to go in his first round of chemo, which was really nice because I got to see it firsthand and understand the process and know what his day to day would be like. But other than that, he had to be on his own. So what we did to kind of boost his spirits every day was a new person would drop him off in the morning and a different person would pick him up in the afternoon so that he would still get his visitors in on the days that he was in. And that was super helpful. And in New York, it's very hard to find somebody who not only will give up their time, but has a car. 

JOYCE: Yeah.

SHANE: And that was difficult. So, you know, the support of, by chance, one of my old bar regulars is a urologist. And when all of this had gone down, she was our angel. A huge, huge thank you to Courtney, because when I had found out, I was so sad at work one day that I had told one of my friends, my coworkers, and she was like, you should talk to Courtney. She's a urologist. I did. And she put us in touch with the best doctors in the city, did all of the legwork for us. And I did, that was another thing that I didn't realize was such a huge help until the end, was she had done all the legwork for us, because all they said was, okay, you have to go have surgery now. And you just trust the doctor, you don't know who to go to. And then they say, okay, next chemo, you have to look for under yourself for yourself as to who carries your insurance, what's closest to your living situation [and] how can you get there? And these are all the things that she really jumped in and just totally eliminated and took off of our plates. And so, that's kind of where, so my first doctor that we had, my first neurologist, so I was going to see him on my own and he was telling me that, oh, it's just cysts and all this, and then we'll put you on antibiotics. And then I'm going home and I'm telling Sarah that, oh yeah, I'm on antibiotics, don't worry. And then when I went back, he was kind of like, oh no, this is cancerous. And I'm kind of like, huh? What do you mean? You just told me two weeks ago that it was a cyst. And he goes, yeah, we need to do surgery in two weeks. So I'm like, I'm getting hit with so many kind of like punches. I'm getting shot so many times. I'm on my own as well. And remember I told you I don't do well listening to doctors when I'm in there. So I'm coming out with small little snippets of information and that's where I'm texting Sarah saying that, hey, the doctor's telling me I have cancer now and I have surgery in two weeks. And I'm like, if you're telling a young man or a young woman that like, listen, it's fine one week and then in two weeks later, it's a whole different scenario, you're kind of like, very shocked. I literally stood in the middle of Manhattan on my own, eating a salad, nearly crying. I didn't know what to do. I was in a very vulnerable place.

And then that's where Sarah, thank God, she opened up her mouth at work and she just found out that one of her regulars was a urologist and she took over. She was kind of like, listen, let me take over because it's all about who you know, not what you know. You need to have friends. Sometimes doctors just think, like use you, as a number. Whereas Courtney, she was kind of like, OK, this is a family friend. I'm going to get you the best care. And she did. And it was really, it was amazing, even to the time.

SARAH: So when Shane had gone in for her surgery, they expedited it as quickly as possible by the time. So he had gone to one doctor that he was assigned to just by residential location. And so after we had started talking to Courtney, she was like, I have a friend who's a specialist in this specifically, [and] this is where you should go.

So she had sent us on to a second opinion. And we decided to move forward with this doctor. And he was amazing; expedited it within a week, Shane was in the surgery room. And so because they were all kind of friends, and she knew me. Shane had given them permission to talk to me while he was in surgery and at this point they didn't know it was cancerous they just knew that it was a lump that needed to be removed, and so while he was in surgery she calls me and she says I have permission to talk to you and I need to let you know what's happening and they had already known that it was cancer and that it had spread into his lymph nodes, abdomen, and all the way up to his lungs. And so I'm walking down, I remember walking down the street looking for somewhere to find breakfast, killing some time for the surgery. And she calls me and tells me he has cancer.

And I didn't--I'm not a very emotional person--my emotions came flooding, I hysterically lost it in the street, walking down Fifth Avenue in the middle of Manhattan, broke down into tears, you see people staring at me, but you know, no one knows what to do or what's happening. And I just hysterically lost it. And then about 30 seconds later, I was like, OK, what do I do? And so she walks me through the whole situation. But in that sense, I never could have broken down like that in front of him. And that's why we call her our angel, because she eliminated so much stress in certain situations that we had no idea how much stress she had alleviated until it was all said and done.

And so by the time Shane had got to me, they had to wake him up from surgery and tell him, and still in anesthesia, still through all of his just going through a whole surgical procedure, was still foggy, cloudy, had no clue what's happening. They wake you up and say, you have cancer. OK, you need to go home now and get out of here because it's COVID.

JOYCE: Oh my.

SARAH: So all of these things and he's texting me calling me are you here, what's happening, they're telling me something I don't really understand. I said I know the full story. You can come down whenever you're ready, and I'll explain to you what's happening. And on the car ride home, I had to tell him his diagnosis. It's insane the way it all worked out. But I was so thankful for that connection. And we know that so many people go through this, don't have that.

We are just like, how can we help anybody that's going through this?

And that was the one thing that we were so thankful for, was just being given a 10 step ahead of the game throughout every single process that we went through. And that's just, it's just stress. You're just relieving stress. And this is such a high stress situation. You don't know until you go through it.

JOYCE: Well, and you make a really good point, especially in New York City, but I've interviewed other young men who have had testicular cancer, but have also talked about finding a doctor who has experience with this, because as you saw with your first urologist, who didn't, it sounds like, didn't know what it was, had you wait two weeks.

 And, you know, there are places around the country that, you can find where they have experience. They being the physicians and they know how to treat testicular cancer, do whatever surgery and so forth. So you're really lucky Courtney was there, as you said, your angel, because I think it really made a big difference for you. So I'm so glad that it happened.

SHANE: It did. It was kind of like a person you could ring and she could kind of talk to you off the phone and say, she could dumb you down. She could be, listen Shane, don't worry about it; we got you, you're in good hands, whereas a doctor when he's in his uniform has to [do] protocol and say the correct word and the correct terminology and all that; that's where I kind of struggle at the start, because the doctor can't tell you that hey listen, you're going to be okay, you know what kind of way because there's some scenarios where it's like you're not okay, and then the doctor is like, then he's held responsible, so sometimes the doctors have to save their side before they kind of like explain what the situation is. So that's what I kind of learned going through my process.

JOYCE: Well, I also will just say quickly before I get back to ice cream that I'm glad you told your family, Shane, as well, because I think that's another roadblock for many young men is to check their testicles, you know. It's like doing a breast exam. It's like, ‘oh, everybody knows that.’

Well, no, they don't. And you don't know, until someone goes through it.

SHANE: So all my friends are aware of it because I've gone through it. But the amount of people that actually get cancer is crazy. When it touches you, when you kind of… I went through 24 years of 25 years of like no cancer or not knowing anyone that has cancer, till me getting diagnosed with cancer and my auntie getting diagnosed with breast cancer within the same week. So like my family got hit pretty, pretty hard in one week. So that's kind of, that's spread awareness with me. I'm always telling my friends and my family, just go get checked out.

JOYCE: Yeah. I think the family history is important. I'm adopted and I have found my birth family, and I know my history, and there's lots of cancer on my mother's side, my birth mother's side, so, you know, which I've had too.

But let's go back to your ice cream now, because what are you going to do now? COVID's still here, but are you going to be back in your bars and coffee shop, or what's going to happen with the Big Shane's ice cream?

SHANE: So we got a small little mention on Fox 5 Good Morning Show; they were just doing an article on how a small business came about during COVID and then obviously because I got cancer and how it went along with the whole cancer process.

Big Shane's Ice Cream is just getting bigger and bigger each week and this summer is going to be crazy and we're moving into a lot of bars, we're moving into a couple of shops. We're moving to manufacturing at the end of the month and we're getting a company to make our ice cream for us upstate. They're gonna put it, yeah, I know we're getting fancy now. We're moving into a huge freezer and then that will just give me a chance to get out and just chat to people and it'll give Sarah a chance to just grow the business like true media, true logistics and all that. So we're just getting bigger and bigger.

JOYCE: So Sarah, are you really excited for that? Are you going to be the recipe developer for the ice cream?

SARAH: Yeah, so all of our recipes so far are homemade. They're all of our recipes. I create them, Shane approves them. And, you know, I call him Mikey likes it because he loves to take a bite and either says it's delicious or it's horrible. So, you know, he's very honest, which I love/hate, you know, but it makes it better. I'm like, be nice. But yeah, we have a lot of pending flavors. We've tried to perfect our staples up until now.

So [we offer] our honeycomb, we have an Irish ginger swirl, which has Irish cream liqueur in it. We have our rocky road to Dublin, which has a little bit of Guinness stout in there. You know, we have like our Irish staples that we're really trying to make sure that they're 100% solid before we move it into factory setting. But that is the most exciting part; we've gotten, you know, to the point to where COVID has actually helped us grow and in a good way. So now we could mass produce and all of these things and flavors.

We have so many flavors. Everybody wants a certain ‘do this’ and Irish coffee and you know raspberry ripple and what about some more vegan line, and so yeah, I know we're super excited this summer has a lot to bring, you know, we're super thankful to even have this opportunity throughout the cancer and COVID and everything that we've been through. And it just seems like that was five years ago, because this whole year has gone by so fast, yet so slow. So yeah, no, it's, it's been a really great thing. But we're excited to move forward with all the ice cream and kind of make this just a story behind us at this point.

JOYCE: Yeah. One of the most unusual flavors I had was in Kansas City a couple of years ago with my brother and his wife, and it was Burnt Ends ice cream, because Kansas City's a big barbecue town. It was different. I'm not saying it was a fave, but it's something different.

SHANE: Yeah, people are starting to get pretty excited about ice cream. Just wait for a tomato ketchup ice cream.

JOYCE: Oh, gosh. We used to make peach ice cream. We had fresh peaches and we'd make that when I was a kid. So now, Sarah, are you doing your pastry chef [work] in the coffee shop? Are you still creating pastries?

SARAH: No, not anymore. So COVID had, everything had shut down and because the coffee shop that we had opened up was still brand new. They ended up merging it with the bar, so it wasn't its own separate entity anymore, which actually worked better for everybody. So I had helped them kind of create this item, you know, their food items, some drinks, and help them kind of create a separate brand, but then merging it in with their bar was better for them.

I also realized I am not a 6 am person. Because all of my other jobs, I didn't have to start till 9 or 10. And so, I wasn't the baker of the day. When I started doing that, I'm like, oh, this is not for me. But it worked out in everybody's favor. With the reopening of everything and COVID, we decided it's best that I focus on the ice cream as much as possible to kind of help us get to this point. We did have some delays, obviously, with the cancer. We would have hopefully been into manufacturing six months ago. But we're okay. We're organically growing. So it's great. It's actually worked out in our favor. So no, I'm just focusing on the ice cream right now. And, you know, it's literally Shane and I myself who do everything. We do have a designer that helps us just because I'm not 100% perfect. And, you know, Photoshop and Illustrator. But other than that, it's just been him and I. We don't have employees, we don't have anything we just figured out along the way.

JOYCE: That's wonderful, yeah. So my last question for both of you, and Shane, I'll start with you, is what advice--and you've already kind of mentioned this--but if other young men are worried about having testicular cancer or think they might have it, any tips you want to provide to them? Yeah, as I say, just please guys, just open up your mouths, just say to someone, say to a friend, say to your dad, even say to, like, I would have said it to my mother if I was back in Ireland, but I didn't want to burden her with the call and all that.

So just obviously check yourself a lot of times. And my mates are always like, how do you know you have something down there? And I was like, listen, you know your body the best. No one else does. You know yourself. You'll know one day when you come across something that just shouldn't be there.

JOYCE: So Sarah, how about you as a caregiver? Do you have advice for other caregivers who are helping someone with testicular cancer?

SARAH: Yeah, so, along the way, my goal was to alleviate the stress off of Shane, which I feel that along with the help of friends and family, we were able to do that. So when you hear Shane talk about it, he has no clue as to when his appointments were, or he didn't have to schedule anything. He literally just had to be show up and get better. And that was our goal. And so one thing with that was, you know, reaching out to the person not only who's going through the cancer, but who's aiding in the helping process was super, super helpful.

You know, everyone who kind of would text me or call me day to day and just check in to see how I was doing, just it validates everything that you're working for and also allows you to kind of process the situation. You know, I'm very good at turning off emotions and just going in, okay, let's do this. Let's, let's fight, we got this.

And I think I had to learn how to process. And, you know, I wasn't going through it physically, but mentally and emotionally, it was extremely stressful. So just kind of reaching out to the people that are, you know, even his parents, I would check in on them on a daily and tell them what was happening. You know, your son is doing great. He's, you know, or today's he's having an OK day and he's sleeping half the day. You know, I would let them know what was happening because they were so far away--I think just constant communication and not being afraid to talk about it.

Some people I know never reached out because they feel like, well, that's so personal. I heard about it, but I didn't want to ask you. I'm like, well, you know, I would have more appreciated you've being like, hey, listen, I heard what's happening; if you need anything, I'm here, or I just want you to know, I'm thinking about you.

Like those tiny, tiny words are the best thing. It's, you know, when you're mourning or going through, you know, I don't want to say mourn because that's associated with death, but you're processing these situations. Just the thought that somebody else is thinking about you is extremely helpful. People don't know what to say or do, and they'd look at you and just feel sad for you. It's just the acknowledgement, I would say, is the biggest thing. We had that left and right, and I'm super thankful for that.

My family, my friends, Shane's friends, Shane's best friends were checking on me all the time. And that's also really nice, just to support.

SHANE: Yeah, support is everything. And kind of just like the mental aspect. Mental health is obviously serious within young men, especially in Ireland, especially in America. Between the ages of 20 and 25, you're very young, you're very vulnerable. Just guys, just get out and talk to each other. I know it sounds a bit weird that like, oh, hey, guys don't talk to each other. But like, honestly, you need to. There's just not enough men talking to each other. And then that's the problem.

I'll switch back on what I was saying. You'll know yourself when there's something wrong with you. So just please go get it checked out. Because you just don't want to leave it too long. When it's too long, it's going to be too late. And it just creates different problems, which is just harder to face. But just the support in the community, just reach out to your friends that are going through this. Like the little things, like bringing food to me was like just unbelievable. Like just the small little tokens of appreciation and the love was just crazy.

JOYCE: Yeah. So last question, really, last question. Where can our listeners find Big Shane's Ice Cream if you're in the New York City area?

SHANE: So we are located in a few different wholesale locations where you can pick up pints and half pints and things like that. But in the next month, things are going to be changing to where you could go straight on our website and order shipments nationwide. So that's our goal for distribution and manufacturing so that you can just, no matter where you are, New York or not, you can try Big Shane’s Ice Cream.

 JOYCE: Okay. Is the website live now? Can you give us that URL?

SHANE: Yes. So it's Big Shane's Ice Cream.com and you can actually put your email into a mailer so that once we start shipping, we'll send you a promo code, try us out, get the notifications when we're ready to go. And hopefully within the next month to two months, everything will be, you know, past the beta testing and we will make sure that everybody gets their ice cream.

JOYCE: Perfect. Wow, I'm ready. I'll be looking. So I want to thank you both for being with me today. This was a really good conversation, very, you know, I think helps a lot of people. And I'll just tell our listeners to join us next time for Don't Give Up on Testicular Cancer.

SHANE AND SARAH: Thank you so much for having us.

JOYCE: Thank you. Remember during Testicular Cancer Awareness Month to talk with your sons, brothers, husbands, partners, and others about this cancer that affects one in every 250 males during their lifetime. Teenage boys through men in their 50s can be diagnosed with testicular cancer. And in 2021, the American Cancer Society expects diagnosis of almost 9,500 men with this disease. And remember, about 440 of these men will die from testicular cancer. Be vigilant and speak up if you find a lump on your testicle. And join us next time for Don't Give Up on Testicular Cancer from the Max Mallory Foundation.



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