Lewisham man living with prostate cancer inspired by Trisha Goddard’s Celebrity Big Brother appearance

Trisha Goddard’s appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, while undergoing palliative treatment for stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, struck a chord with Claus Jacobsen. The 58-year-old from Lewisham, who is living with stage 4 prostate cancer, describes how her honesty about life with cancer inspired him.

When Trisha Goddard walked into the Celebrity Big Brother house, she made a bold statement: “We cannot be so scared of dying that we become scared of living.”

As someone living with stage 4 prostate cancer myself – diagnosed at 56 – this rings true.

Sadly, it should never have gotten this far as a simple Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) Test could have caught this in time, and it would have been very easy to cure. 

Prostate cancer is so common that all men over 50 should go to their GP and get a PSA test. Book a time today. Please.

Trisha’s motivation to appear on the reality TV show was to use it as a platform to say something so rarely heard about what it’s really like for the 3.5million people living with cancer in the UK. 

In October 2023, I received the shock diagnosis of stage 4 prostate cancer, meaning it had already spread to other parts of my body. I had been struggling to pee, so I went to my GP, who found blood in my urine.

After a prostate probe, he put me on an accelerated diagnosis pathway. I went for scans, and they told me I had cancer in the whole of my prostate.

More scans and I was told it was in my lymph nodes and in my peritoneum. I was told that statistically, my life expectancy was eight years.

For a moment, I was devastated. I sat on the sofa looking into space. And then I thought where is this mood going to get me? So far, it had only gotten me to the sofa. I refuse to sit and wait for the inevitable. 

I want to live the rest of my life, however short it might be. Eight years is better than eight months, I thought.

I found a group called Cancer, Don’t Let It Win (www.cancerdontletitwincic.com). We meet once a month and talk about our symptoms, financial worries, and fear of telling our families our diagnosis. We help each other, I found a community. I found hope.

When I’d been unable to pee, I’d had a catheter put in. This stayed in for around a year while I waited for a minor operation to allow me to pee again naturally. I was told I would be able to start radiotherapy once it had been removed.

So after the removal of the catheter, I was excited when I met a consultant at the hospital. But he told me he wouldn’t recommend radiotherapy because “it wouldn’t give me any survival advantage”.

That hit me hard.  I spent three days in my pyjamas because it felt like I was told I didn’t have any chance of surviving. I thought, if the consultant has given up on me, then I might as well give up too.

Fortunately, this was when I was referred by my GP for palliative care at my local hospice in South London, St Christopher’s.

I rediscovered my hope and drive again with the support I had from Jeff, my social worker, and from a community navigator, Miranda and welfare officer, Danilo, who helped me with applying for financial help, as well as Leann, my nurse, who helped me write to that same consultant. 

Eventually, I went back and met him and told him how much his words had hurt me. I gave him some alternatives for conversations like that in the future.

With a diagnosis like mine, I only have hope left. So, if you crush our hope, you crush our spirit.

My treatment is now an injection every 12 weeks of something called Zoladex into my tummy.  This suppresses my testosterone and stops the prostate cancer cells from multiplying.

But it also rolled back a decade’s worth of puberty in six months. 

I’ve lost my manly body hair on my chest, legs and arms. I lost muscle mass in my whole body, making me feel feeble and old. I’ve also lost my libido and my ability to have an erection.

This is not just hard for me but also my wife and family. We have had to make many adjustments to continue having as close to normal family life as possible. It is only by the support of my strong and loving wife, Mary, that this has been possible.

But I have a drive for life. And I am still working on getting cured of this. 

Trisha’s honesty about what it’s really like to go through cancer treatment is refreshing, saying last week: ‘My palliative care team – and when I say that word everybody screams and runs away, but it’s symptom treatment – is working with the team here too.”

Like Trisha, I am still living, I can still see my friends and do things, I can still spend time with my family and live my life to the fullest and give my life meaning.

And like her, I also find meaning in sharing what I’ve learnt from cancer and having conversations about it.

I guess that getting a terminal diagnosis is hard, and it is hard to understand what to do with it. 

For me to make sense of it all and give the rest of my life meaning, I have decided to spread awareness and stop the stigma men have around talking about prostate cancer.

When I go out with my wife, she has to warn male friends that I’ll start asking them to get their prostate checked. I come in, put a bottle of Prosecco on the table and say, ‘Have you had your prostate checked lately’. 

I am literally talking to everybody about prostate cancer: friends and family, the men at the train station gates, strangers at the café, men out for a Sunday walk in the park.

I am delighted Trisha could show what palliative care really is and what people with cancer can do. And how, with the right support in place, you can approach cancer and life-limiting illnesses by trying to live life to the full, for as long as possible.  

That’s how I’m living.

Pictured top: Claus Jacobsen and his wife Mary (Picture: Claus Jacobsen)