Don’t Give Up on Testicular Cancer

Taking Care of Life with Non-Traditional Yoga and Optimism – A Testicular Cancer Survivor’s Story - Season 2, Episode 3

December 17, 2021 The Max Mallory Foundation - Joyce Lofstrom host Season 2 Episode 3
Don’t Give Up on Testicular Cancer
Taking Care of Life with Non-Traditional Yoga and Optimism – A Testicular Cancer Survivor’s Story - Season 2, Episode 3
Show Notes Transcript

Tim Kenny decided to take care of life after testicular cancer with a positive outlook and nontraditional yoga. Learn more about this home inspector and yoga instructor who talks about his approach to life in Chichester, England, UK.  His optimism provides insights valuable to everyone touched by cancer, and listeners will learn more about why he likes and teaches nontraditional yoga. Listen to Tim on the Don't Give Up on Testicular Cancer podcast from the Max Mallory Foundation.

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Taking Care of Life with Nontraditional Yoga and Optimism: a Testicular Cancer’s Survival Story – with Tim Kenny – season 2, episode 3

 

Welcome to Don't Give Up on Testicular Cancer, where cancer survivors, caregivers, and others touched by cancer share their stories. The Max Mallory Foundation presents this podcast in honor and memory 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, and with me today is Tim Kenny. Tim Kenny is a testicular cancer survivor, nontraditional yoga teacher, and a home inspector in Chichester, England in the United Kingdom. an active supporter of Movember, he joins me today to share his testicular cancer story. So Tim, thanks so much for taking the time to be with me and be on my podcast. I really appreciate it.


 TIM: No, thank you for inviting me.

 

JOYCE: So let's start out with your story. Tell us what happened, when, where, anything you'd like to share with us.

 

TIM: Yeah, well, it was 31st of August 2019. I was at a musical festival, and I was just kind of using the urinals, as you do, and just noticed a small lump. Kind of instinctively, it didn't feel right. I'd always checked, probably not as regularly as you should do, but I think on a reasonable basis. So I kind of knew what I should feel and knew what I, you know, and this didn't feel like something that I really should be feeling there. It's kind of a situation, I was, you know, it was Friday at this music festival, due to be there till, you know, till Sunday, or Monday morning. So I didn't tell anybody, didn't mention it to my partner that was there, you know. It's kind of a very, very strange three days. I think about that. She thought I was going to kind of break up with her, actually.

 

I was so kind of distant because obviously this thing just sat with me, but [once I] got back on Monday, pretty much the first thing I did was say [to her], look, you know, I found this, and it's something I'm going to need to deal with. That afternoon, we went to see a doctor, and about three days later, then had an ultrasound. So obviously what they do is they ultrasound both testes to see what's there. Optic scan is a very clear way of determining whether there's any form of tumour present. And then about--I don't know, maybe less than a week later--I was fortunate enough to get an appointment with probably one of the top testicular cancer surgeons in this country. I don't know if initially he was going to see me, but he said to me, okay, we'll operate tomorrow, which was a little bit kind of too quick for me.

 

So a week later, they carried out the surgery, removed the testicle--so radical orchidectomy. And then it's just as a person think most cancer patients, particularly testicular cancer go through, it's that kind of waiting whilst they determine the nature of the cancer, determine how far it's spread, which is a strange time unless you're just kind of in this sort of slight limbo, you know, you're thinking, okay, well, these are the possible things that can happen. Personally, I didn't like to kind of explore the possibilities too much, because then you can kind of get bogged down in stuff. But then I was on a train, on the way to a meeting and got a call from him, and he said yeah, it's stage 2a, which means that there has been some spread. There are some cells that are concerning, [that] had spread to the lymph nodes, but fortunately no further, which meant three rounds of chemotherapy--what they call BEP chemotherapy--a mixture of three particular chemo drugs which are given in three cycles, three weeks. First week was essentially three days in hospital while they gave me literally everything, bags and bags of all of it. And then you get four days off, and then the next week you're back in then for just a very quick dose of one, and then another week and a quick dose of one, and then whole thing starts again. And that took me to kind of the tail end of December. And yeah, I’ve been kind of clear since then.

 

JOYCE: That's wonderful. I also want to just mention and get your reaction, because you went to the doctor right away, and I know a lot of young men I've talked to don't. Talk about that. Talk about why you were ready to go check it out.

 

TIM: In some ways, because I've had a slightly difficult health history in a lot of ways. I've had some problems with my liver. I had to have a large chunk of my liver removed a few years ago and some infection issues and stuff like that. So I've kind of, I suppose, in a way, had enough of a scare to think, actually, I need to take care of this body that I'm in. I've always had, I suppose, since then, I've had a very active role in looking after my body, trying to always do what was good for it. [The lump} felt very wrong. The lump just didn't feel like something that should be there. You know, it was difficult to kind of process that at first. And I think because I'd maybe had those three days where I've literally just kind of kept it to myself and I just sat with it, it was quite tricky.

 

But I'm quite fortunate in that my partner is kind of the same as me. She's very active in looking after her health for her own reasons. So literally, as soon as I told her, that was it. There was no other choice. I was going to have an appointment. My regular doctor couldn't see me, I think, for a week. So then there was a ringing around and saying, no, we're going to see somebody today, and we're going to deal with this today. So she really supported that, that very active getting on with it and just getting it dealt with.

 

JOYCE: You know, what I think is interesting about your saying too, Tim, is I've run into this with my own health because I've had, you know, cancer several times and survived it and it's kind of being your own advocate or having somebody with you who can be an advocate because I agree with you, it's like, to me, waiting is the worst of any of it--just waiting to find out what someone's going to tell you. And so I applaud you both for getting that done and getting in there, and then you know what you have to deal with.

 

TIM: Yeah, I mean it's scary, because sometimes there's a there's a weird sort of false comfort in in leaving it, and again I know that in those sort of three days where I didn't tell anybody, I was able to sort of, I suppose, find a way to almost ignore it--even though you know I kept kind of almost, like, unconsciously my hand was kept kind of looking for the lump, and kept touching it, even though I hated touching it. But still in some ways my head was sort of finding some space away from it, you know, which is an odd human trait--but then as soon as you do bring it out in a sense, you tell somebody else, and then you just go through that process, you know.

 

I mean you just have to push through; you have to find the people that can help you, and then let them do their work. I think for me one of the kind of concepts that really helped is--I know they're kind of almost the traditional approach--is that you battle cancer, and you say it's helping you survive cancer, and I think that's a in some ways a very helpful analogy for a lot of people. But it never felt right for me, because if you're battling cancer, you're battling your own body. Because, you know, cancer is something that does come from the body. It comes, it happens internally. It's created within the body. So this kind of idea of ‘battling it’ never felt comfortable with me. I think it was more getting the right people to deal with it.

 

And then my job was just to support my body through that process. I mean, I was literally just moving, moving through the process. It wasn't, it wasn't a fight. It wasn't a battle. It was just a process that I had to move through. And you move through it in the best way possible. You try and support your body in the best way possible, but you’re not battling. And I think that also was quite helpful for me, because without, if I didn't view it as a battle, it wasn't something that I could lose. You were literally just, it's a process, and a process just has an outcome. It doesn't have a win-lose scenario. So it was never occurred to me that it was a losing issue. Do you know what I mean?

 

JOYCE: That makes sense.

 

TIM: Yeah, I was just always--that was just my kind of approach to it, you know, I sort of say once you'd want to find identify the people that are great at what they're doing, and I was lucky to be able to find them. We, obviously we have our health system; it’s obviously different from yours in America. But I was able to access a hospital called the Royal Marsden based initially in Chelsea in London. And then I had most of my treatment actually in just outside London in a place called Sutton. And literally all they do is treat cancer. That is fundamentally all that happens in this hospital. You go to the Royal Sutton and pretty much everybody there is either in the process of treatment for cancer, or they're in the process of that kind of checkup afterwards. And all the nurses, all the staff, all the doctors, that's all they do every day is deal with cancer patients. So they have the best specialists for that. And, you know, they have dealt with every type of cancer within that organization, but you also have the people that deal with specifically with those individual cancers. And I think that was once I'd got myself in front of the person that was the best at doing it, I didn't have to fight, I didn't have to struggle. I just had to support the process that was happening.

 

JOYCE: Right. What do you think was your biggest challenge during the process?

 

TIM: I think it was letting go and allowing myself to be supported by others. So, you know, much as my job is to support my body, to do that, I had to let other people support me because as you go through that journey, it doesn't leave much else for the day-to-day life. You know, I had to stop work. I had to just kind of almost shut down to a certain degree. And, the chemo process for testicular cancer is intense. You know, you are literally just in hospital connected to a drip, having the chemicals pumped through you for three days in a row. And the way they do it, they test you in the morning to make sure they're safe to give you the chemotherapy drugs. Then they kind of pump water through you and then they pump the drugs through you. And then towards the end of that, they then pump you full of steroids to make sure you don't get an allergic reaction to those drugs. But of course, by the time all those drugs have gone through, it's four o'clock in the morning, at which point they're pumping you full of steroids, in which case you're not gonna sleep. So you get this three-day process where you are, you know, physically hammered by the drugs themselves, but also by the lack of sleep, being stuck in an uncomfortable hospital room. So you come out of it, not in the best place to really do it. I would get home and I would collapse, and that would be me collapsed certainly for the next two days. And as somebody who's always, I'm the sort of person that will always try and support and care about those people around me. I'll try and do everything for them, often too much. And I think that, you know, there's a link between that and cancer and stress, which we can come to later. But I had to choose to, I didn't have to choose to, I had no choice but to step back from that kind of caring role I'd got used to playing, particularly with my partner, and allow her to take over. which was hard to do. In a funny sort of way, the fact that the chemotherapy didn't allow me to do anything that I would have normally done was beneficial because I wasn't given any choice but to accept that I couldn't do what I wanted to do, couldn't support her in the way that I was used to. You know, we had a very difficult period. Just a few months before I found my lump, we'd got a puppy.

 

JOYCE: Oh boy, okay.

 

TIM: Yeah, exactly. We'd lost our previous dog suddenly and we'd got this young puppy. I think he came in in late June and I found the lump in August. So, you know, a puppy is a bit of work, involved in having a puppy, and he was quite lively as any puppy is,  although quite good actually as puppies go. But quite early on in my treatment process, he ate some sand, we took him to the beach. and he decided he was going to dig a hole in the wet sand and literally fill his stomach full of sand.

 

JOYCE: Oh my goodness, Tim.

 

TIM: Yeah, I know. So we then had this period where he was literally just throwing up constantly, had to take him to the vet, and at one point he had to spend a week at the vet just while they tried to empty out his stomach, keep him on fluids and keep him going. And at the same time, I was off in Sutton at the hospital having my chemotherapy. So there was my partner stuck at home ringing the vets to see how the dog was and ringing me to see how I was doing.

 

So for me, as somebody who would normally be the person kind of, trying to care for everything, trying to sort of support everybody else. it was hard to accept that. That was a challenge for me. But in some ways, it's been good for me to go through that. I'm somebody who tries to take something positive from whatever you can, try and learn whatever you do, you can learn something from it. So for me cancer taught me actually that I can step back, I can let other people look after me and actually they benefit from that as well because you know if somebody loves you and cares about you, then actually they want to look after you when you need it--they're happy to do that, it makes them feel good to be able to do it. So yeah, it taught me a lot about that, and I think it you know, it was a challenge, and it wasn't an easy thing to do and it's not the way I'd like to learn something like that, but actually it's given me something that is beneficial moving forward.

 

JOYCE: You know, I think you hit on a really important point, which is it's okay to ask for help. And as you said, you don't have a choice. You need the help, so you have to kind of go with it, which I think is hard for people in many situations, not just cancer, you know, to do that. What's the importance of the support system? You talked about that.

 

TIM: Yeah, I mean, it's, it is vital, I think, if I'm honest. I think if that, if that support, the support system, the core of that was, was my partner who was there every step of the way, but also friends and family and, everyone who was involved in that process. You know, I think from a friend of mine, she had cancer a few years ago. So, a couple of days before I was due for my chemo, I came around for dinner, sat down, [and] she kind of talked me through her experience of that process.

 

Now, everyone's experience of chemotherapy is different. But, you know, she was able to give me some insight into what it was like. So I wasn't going into it completely blind. You know, that was so beneficial. The friends and family that gave me a lift to my treatments was a huge benefit. You know, my partner doesn't drive. Where I was having my treatment was about an hour and a half away from where I live. So, you know, somebody had to drive me down there to have it. They had to hang around all day because as you probably know, cancer treatment takes [a while] and then you wait around and it's not a quick process. And then obviously, give me a lift back. Just without that practical support, it becomes impossible. But also, feeling that you have that support structure around you makes it manageable. As humans, we need to feel part of a tribe, a pack, whatever you want to call it, a family, to be able to function. We don't, as beings, we don't really exist singularly. We can't manage these situations by ourselves emotionally, so you need to feel there is somebody there, somebody who wants to look after you, somebody who wants you to feel better, to move through that process.

 

JOYCE: You're right. You're 100% right. I agree with you. And I know with my illnesses over time, it's always been my family, my girlfriends, my partner. So it's a very important point. You know, we talked about stress when we first connected, in the contribution of stress to illness. And I know you have some thoughts on that. Why don't you share?

 

 

TIM: Yeah, well, you know, I know for me that my cancer developed after was probably the longest sustained period of emotional stress that I've probably suffered. It's kind of  an issue that I had to move through. And for various reasons, it wasn't something that I could really share and do and involve other people into. It was just this difficult situation that existed for a while. Then I went from that and then, then my dog died and I was there with him at the end, and it was a very emotional thing. And that then added additional stress onto it.

 

But, you know, as most humans we kind of think, okay, life's stressful and you get on with it. It wasn't until really after, after my treatment had finished, after I was kind of doing other things, that I started to read and find out about there is much information and evidence of this massive connection between stress, particularly kind of unresolved or unacknowledged stress, and how the body responds to those small cancer cells that always develop and then can develop into full-blown cancer. This [is] the way particularly within sort of hormone-based cancers such as testicular cancer or breast cancer.

 

I think to maybe to give a kind of a good example, there was a study around the 1994 soccer world cup final between Italy and Brazil. Anybody who follows football might remember it as the game that Ronaldo had some kind of seizure before the game, but was still made to play, probably for sponsorship reasons. So it was quite a dramatic game in itself. But a group of scientists did a study. They took testosterone measures from Italian fans and Brazilian fans. Two sets of fans who are well known to be quite passionate about the game. And so they took these samples from these men before the game and after the game--the game Italy won. And they found that the Italian men, their testosterone levels had increased. Brazilian men, testosterone levels had decreased. So, you know, both of these groups have been through the same kind of stress in a way.

 

JOYCE: Right.

 

TIM: You know, the game was, as a World Cup final, stressful. It's going to be emotional for those that care about the result. But Italian men, they'd won. Therefore, their testosterone levels went up. They'd kind of succeeded. The Brazilian men, Brazilian fans, testosterone levels went down because they'd lost. And that's so interesting. So we kind of view testosterone, particularly as a kind of driver between male aggression and winning and succeeding and all these things. But actually, it's a hormone that responds to external events, it doesn't lead to them.

 

That's just one, that's kind of a big example. But I think there are all of these connections between how we navigate and deal with stress in our lives, and how the body responds. And again, it kind of comes back to me as somebody who always felt a need to kind of care and look after those people around them and do everything for them. But again,  there's a lot of links between people that get cancer and those people that feel they need to do everything around them. You know, it's quite often the case to say, oh, you know, it's always the nicest people that get these horrible diseases. Well, there's actually a lot of truth in that. It's because those people are so nice, they're taking on a lot of stress that they're not able then to perhaps share with others or unload onto somebody else. That then has the impact on their body, that then, you know, causes the impact on the immune system and the endocrine system. And then that's where the cancers then start to form and don't get dealt with. So it's kind of, in a weird sort of way, you always have this; I almost have to acknowledge that my own way of dealing with stress was probably a primary causer in my cancer. which is a difficult thing to acknowledge. But I think it's been important for me to recognize that, because then it gives me a very strong indicator that actually no, I don't want to do that anymore. I actually need to be able to say offload the stress, I need to take the support from others. So I'm not then causing myself physical harm through it.

 

JOYCE: Well, that's a good segue, I think, to my next question or topic is about you being a yoga teacher and how you got into doing that. And what is non-traditional yoga? I don't know what that is.

 

TIM: Well, I mean, there's only so much time for your podcast I could get into. And I'll say things that may upset more traditional elements within the yoga team.

 

JOYCE: Well, share what you want then, yes.

 

TIM: I will try and be diplomatic about how I talk. I kind of fell into yoga in a weird sort of way by accident. I, as I said, had problems with my liver. They had to do open surgery. So it was quite a large incision through my abdomen. And as a result of that, I ended up with back problems. If you cut through the abdomen, you pull everything forward as the scar tissue forms, [and that] puts pressure on the lower back. And inevitably I had back problems. At the time, my partner was doing yoga. She was enjoying it, but again, she was kind of doing yoga, but getting problems from it. It didn't feel right to her. She'll research anything. She'll really dig deep into finding out what is the right thing. And she found this form of yoga called YogAlign.

 

An amazing lady in Hawaii had developed this YogAlign practice. Having researched it and looked into it, she felt it was good. and wanted me to try it as well because she'd known I'd had problems. Unfortunately, it's not something that many people teach. So  this woman who teaches it in Hawaii, she's taught some people around the world, but not a huge number. But she was, conveniently, coming to Utrecht in the Netherlands, kind of about a few months after we started thinking about this, to start a teacher training program. So despite having never had any kind of yoga practice, no experience, I was kind of like, okay, well, my girlfriend wanted to go and do it. She wanted me to try it. So we both went and traveled off to Utrecht to start this teacher training process. So I kind of, as a result, accidentally became a yoga teacher, but I tried it, enjoyed it. It worked for me. I was approaching it really much as a physical practice, because I had back problems. I was trying to deal with that issue. And it was perfect for that. It really supported my back. So I've pretty much knocked those problems on the head, but oddly enough, because I'd always approached it as a physical practice. I never really got too much into the mental element of it. It was much more about dealing with my issue, my need at the time. I suppose one thing it did teach me was that connection to my body. 

 

So what we call interception, that knowing what's going on inside, being able to stop and listen to your body. And I think, again, this is perhaps coming back to that issue as to why men put off going to the doctor or seeking help with things, is that, I think to a certain extent, [something] tells us to ignore our body. You know, we almost expect now that our body should ache, particularly once we get past a certain age, or if we do exercise or do stuff, our body should hurt. So, you know, oh, you just accept it, get on with it, it's just something that's happening. And I think one of the good examples of that is Lance Armstrong, which I think is a relevant example for this. You know and probably your listeners know, that he put off seeking treatment for problems he was getting symptoms for quite a long time. But obviously in his professional life, he'd been told, ignore your body. Ignore what's happening because, and that makes complete sense if you're a professional cyclist, I mean, you can't cycle hundreds of miles without ignoring your body's physical limits. But the other side of that is, it's no good when you want to try and identify a problem in the body because you've been told, you know, and you've been telling yourself, no, ignore that problem. Just let it happen and push it away. Don't listen to your body.

 

And I think that's what a lot of people do. But with a good yoga practice, you actually  take a step back from that--again, without wanting to be too disparaging about a lot of yoga that is taught--I think there is an element of it, which is well, no, you have to push past the discomfort, because you're trying to get into a certain posture, or you're trying  trying to make your posture look like the ex-dancer that's teaching the class, even though physically you can't do it--but, you know, okay, push, push, push, and you'll get there. Ignore that pain and discomfort, because that's how society has trained us. And  again [this] applies back to that, the stress we were talking about.

 

We know stress has a physical impact on the body. You know, yeah, we have that deeper impact on the hormones and the immune system and everything else. But we all know that stress immediately impacts us. We can feel our shoulders go, we can feel our neck go, we can feel ourselves tighten up. But again, society's told us, no, just ignore that, push through it, and it'll be fine. Well, actually, no, if you stop and listen to it, you can hear that your body is screaming at you, ultimately, from that stress. And you can then take the actions to address it, which I think I learned that lesson very much the hard way. I'd gone through this period of quite intense stress, but I hadn't listened to what my body was telling me. I was telling myself, actually, no, I'm not stressed. I'm not suffering. I'm fine. I'm fine. I'm fine. even though I was getting a lot of feedback from my body that I really should have listened to. And I suppose in some ways it kind of then went through, okay, well, you know, I've told you, I've told you as many times as I can. I can't tell you anymore. I'm going to, you know, throw this at you, which I know is a thing for me, again, it's a useful narrative to say, actually, my body was trying to tell me something. And if I'd listened to it earlier, I might have saved myself the discomfort that I went through after that. So I didn't. So I had to [have] the harsh treatment almost, and it reminds me fairly regularly to stop and listen to it when you need to. So I kind of, I suppose, I try and give some of that back, the students I teach--by giving them a good physical practice that really allows them to hear what their body's telling them, but in a comfortable way without teaching that they have to push past discomfort, but also some really good practices to help directly relieve stress and bring them back into a much more calm place.

 

JOYCE: You hit on a lot of points, Tim. And I think one that's prominent right there is obviously, listen to your body. and people, especially with exercise, you know, and maybe during the last year and a half, almost two years now with COVID, you know, at least that, you know, you see all the ads, everybody's exercising and riding their treadmill or whatever, their bike. And you do have to listen because you can't do everything. And I think that's one of the challenges with exercise and with stress, you know, I have type one diabetes and I have a continuous glucose monitor, which tells me exactly where my blood sugar is. And I have watched it the numbers just go up when I get stressed out about something, like a work thing or whatever, whatever stressors hit you. And it really supports what you're saying too about you know stress does a number on the body and you have to pay attention so I think it's great.

 

TIM: What I'll always say is that stress in itself isn't bad, it affects the body, but if you then hear what the body's telling you, and then find a way to alleviate that stress when you can, that effect dissipates. It's only when you try and maintain that over the long term that you start to really knock the body about past the point where it can really cope.

 

JOYCE: So, I think, too, you mentioned what happened with your lower back and issues with that and the yoga. And I just wanted to have you say a little bit about your business, which is a home inspector. That's a physical job, too. So tell us about your business.

 

TIM: Yeah. So what I think you guys call a home inspector, we call it a surveyor in this country [the U.K.]

 

JOYCE: Assessor. Yes.

 

TIM: So I physically go into people's homes. I look at everything. I can walk around the outside of the home, I climb up in the in the loft in the attic and give them a damn good idea about the condition of the property they're looking to buy. So that you know, once you buy it, what you got to deal with and whether it's something that works for you. You know, it's a job that I've been doing now for, I don't know, 15, 16 years, something like that. And I really enjoy it. It’s good for me as a person that obviously tries to take care of health and what I'm going throughn and everything else in that I can always make time for those things that are important, like my yoga practice, like taking time to care for myself because I work for myself. If I don't want to work, I can just take that time and I can make the time up elsewhere or I can deal with things in the way that suits me because it's just one of those jobs that really is quite flexible.

 

It was difficult [during cancer] because obviously, it's a job that you can't do unless you're really with it. And so I had to stop work during the chemotherapy. And being self-employed, you're not working, you're not bringing in any money. So again, I had to just accept that as part of that process. I couldn't earn the money that I was earning, and I just had to allow that to happen, which was a challenge.

 

JOYCE: Right, yes.

 

TIM: It didn't help that, I think I got back to work in the--I was just kind of starting back to work in late January into February and then of course in March we in the UK had a national lockdown [pandemic] and that was it, you know, [in] lockdown the housing market completely stopped. I still had some issues with my immune system, so literally  didn't leave the house for the best part of three months.

 

But you know, touch wood, since then things have been good and busy.

 

JOYCE: That's great.

 

TIM:  Yeah, the housing market in this country has gone a little bit almost insane. I’ve been flat out since pretty much I came back in the June last year, but it's good for me in that way. It's been able to make up that issue, that timeline to take off, but I’m also really lucky in that I’ve got great people that refer work to me and great clients that respect what I do and how I do it, that were happy to wait. I think again, coming back to my treatments, I had an estate agent, so a realtor phoned me up because they wanted to refer a client to me. And I said, unfortunately, I just can't take the work because I'm off now. You know, try to give them something else. And she said, no, don't worry about it, we'd only ever refer to you. Let us know as soon as you're back and we'll start passing the work back to you. Again, it's just those little signs of support from people outside that really do lift you when you're going through that process, and really kind of help you move through it.

 

JOYCE: Yes, it validates you and people care about what you do, and they know you do a good job, which means a lot. It means a lot to me when people give me that feedback.

 

TIM: So I think that's wonderful. But unless you share with people what you're going through, they don't give you that support. So you don't get that support from people unless you do ask for it. And most people are happy to support you if they like you and like what you're doing and care about you.

 

JOYCE: I've always been very open about my health, maybe too open. I'll tell anybody anything, but it's really helped me to be able to talk about it. People I work with, they knew everything about when I had to go have a surgery or whatever it was. I think that's also very personal. Some people don't want to talk about it. That's okay too, but I've always found that it makes a big difference in how I feel about everything.

 

TIM: Yeah, I mean, that's why I say, you saw that I was obviously doing a few things on LinkedIn about Movember, sharing my various photographs of my mustache that really isn't growing much, and I'm very glad to get rid of come the end of the month. But as a part of that, it's actually been really good for me to share some of my experience of the process. I'd hope that if somebody reads those and they're going through something similar, it's helpful. But actually, you know, I'm kind of doing it for me because I'm expressing what I went through, kind of helping me process it and put it into words and actually just be open about it. And I think that's been a great thing. And I think hopefully it does help other people as well.

 

JOYCE: So what would you say to a young man who thinks he might have testicular cancer or anyone dealing with it now? Just what advice do you have for them?

 

TIM: The only advice I would give is that your loved ones care about you. They care about you for a reason. I think that's the best thing that you can ever get across to somebody. And as soon as you understand that, then it becomes much easier to tell them, and to ask for that support. So yeah, ask for support, but really having your mind first and foremost, that if someone cares about you, they will care about you no matter what is going on, and they will be happy to support you. You know, actually they'll feel, much more positive that they've been able to be there for you. So by sharing with them, you're kind of in a funny sort of way, giving them a gift. Don't think about it as a burden. And again, as you know, men, I suppose we're quite often we're taught that we have to  take things on ourselves and be mature or whatever. But actually, by asking for support, you're offering somebody something amazing as well.

 

JOYCE: You know, that's a really good way to look at it, Tim. I think that's important for people to hear that it's a gift so people can help you. That's good. I like that. So what's next for you in life or career? Anything you want to share? Or nothing, you don't have to share anything.

 

TIM: No, at the moment I'm just trying to get to Christmas. I kind of enjoy what I do, but I'm also, you know, enjoying the yoga that I'm teaching now. Teaching primarily online, because again, it's just the complications here. But it's been quite great, because I teach people from quite a wide geographical area. I have students in London, students locally to me, students in Kenya, some in Goa [in India], just because of the way I've [been] teaching online. Although I am hoping next year to physically get out with people, because again, it's so nice just to, as a teacher, interact with a student in person--you know, really see them. Putting the [classes] online is great. You can reach so many people and it's convenient and everything else, but actually being in the same room as somebody is such a great thing to do. So, hopefully next year, that is something that I can really push forward with as long as, as well as the online stuff and doing the day job as well.

 

JOYCE: Sounds good. Yeah. Well, I appreciate all your time and joining me today. It's been really fun to talk with you and just hear more about your story and what you're doing.

 

TIM: Thank you for what you're doing. I think, you know, if I'd known this podcast existed when I was going through my process, it would have been amazing to listen to. I've only kind of, you know, found out about it recently. I think it's so good to share those experiences and for people to hear these things before, during, and perhaps after their treatment.

 

JOYCE: Yeah, yes, you're right. I agree. Well, thank you, and maybe we can get together again down the road with updates or whatever might be happening.

 

TIM: Yeah, please do.

 

JOYCE: Okay. Thank you for joining me today on Don't Give Up on Testicular Cancer from the Max Mallory Foundation. Go to maxmalloryfoundation.com to learn more about testicular cancer, to donate and send your suggestions for guests on the podcast. And join me next time for Don't Give Up on Testicular Cancer.




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