Don't tell me ‘toxic masculinity’ isn't real – it could have cost me my life

Thanks to that damned Gillette ad everyone’s suddenly talking about toxic masculinity, and it seems to have given a tanker full of oxygen to the freaks who help to make it so toxic in the first place. You know who I’m talking about: Piers Morgan, Fox News anchors, people who use phrases like ‘man up’ ‘snowflake’, and ‘stiff upper lip’. Tossers, in other words.

It’s in part because of the climate we’ve allowed them to create, or perhaps to police because it’s always been around, that when I called to warn one of my editors about why I’d be filing late the other week I couldn’t tell them exactly why.

I hummed and I hah-ed and I finally came up with: “I’ve got to have an uncomfortable medical procedure at hospital”.

I tried to explain it, but it almost felt as if someone had put the sort of microchip Cartman had inserted into his head in South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut to stop him swearing into my brain. I knew what I ought to say, and what I wanted to say, but I couldn’t do it.

The only difference was that my chip didn’t deliver the sort of electric shocks Cartman endured. It was just there saying shhh. This is stuff you don’t talk about.

But perhaps I ought to start at the beginning.

Some months ago I started experiencing problems taking a piss. I was feeling the need to go a lot more often than was comfortable while at the same time finding it very difficult to get rid of the stuff.

I let this go on for a lot longer than I really should have. I have type 1 diabetes, and a range of other issues caused by having been crushed under the wheels of a cement truck during a cycling accident. You’d think, given all that, that I’d have gotten over the male aversion to visiting the doctor, all the more so given that my GP is a shining example of all that is good about the profession.

But that’s not the case. I share my gender’s unfortunate tendency to try and ignore medical issues, in the hope that they’ll go away in preference to addressing them.

It was only after having to get up six or seven times a night, several nights in a row, and feeling half dead through lack of sleep as a result, that I finally bit the bullet.

I fully admit that the fear of prostate cancer, and an awareness that my symptoms were pointing to it, might have been part of the reason why I left it.

Given that catching nasties like that early is the best way of securing a positive outcome that was bloody stupid. But I’d hardly be alone there, now would I?

Mercifully it wasn’t the big C. The tests, which you should go and get right now if you have a similar issue, came back negative. However, even though we tried an effective treatment for an enlarged prostate gland, it didn’t solve the problem.

Cue a referral to a urologist which is when the fun got started. That uncomfortable procedure? It involved lying on a table with my trousers halfway down my legs while someone inserted a tube topped by a tiny camera into my urethra as I swore loudly and creatively.

This led to a diagnosis. I’d half suspected the cement truck might have played a role in my issue and so it proved. As a result of having my pelvis crushed, my bladder no longer works as it should.

There are no effective drugs, and no surgical remedies for my issue. But there is a treatment, although hardly an appealing one: intermittent catheterisation.

That’s when the fun got started. After an early trial I found myself pissing blood, and bits of… I’m still not quite sure what.

It wasn’t quite as frightening as having that truck on top of me, but I’d count somewhere in between The Exorcist and A Quiet Place in terms of the horror it induced.

Worse still, I couldn’t talk to a damn soul about that fear. That toxic chip meant I just mumbled about difficult issues, and uncomfortable procedures… you know the drill.

More tests were ordered, including another spell on that table and another painful tube, which came back negative. The blood was likely caused by not doing the procedure properly.

I was encouraged to write about this by one of my editors, who has written with commendable honesty about her issues and because, having found myself in a very unpleasant place (again), I came to the conclusion that as a society we need to get over our aversion to talking about this sort of thing. We really do. Too many people suffer in silence because we don’t.

This is my way of helping to get that ball rolling.

We also need to tell the people who say things like ‘man up’ to go f*** themselves. Anyone who tries saying that to me will be told to go spend an hour or so under a the wheels of a lorry and see how they deal with it afterwards. If there is an afterwards.

There’s a mildly happy ending to this story. After more tubes, and regrettably more blood, things have started to work a bit better for me.

I was told that this does happen in a minority of cases. Mine seems to be one of them. If only I hadn’t delayed going to the doctor I might have got to that ending a lot earlier.