As several of you know from our previous posts on this forum, (Chippers) and I were totally surprised to receive diagnoses of Prostate Cancer - who isn't? This amazing forum helped enormously with support and guidance and was in fact the way we met. After deliberating and then deciding upon RALP approx 6 months apart, we have recovered well (see Bio's) but are still working through this journey both mentally and physically. At the outset, we struggled. We relied heavily on communities like this for input and information. Looking back we concluded that we missed the easy to access personal stories of experiences. So we wrote our own and actually discovered that it was quite a cathartic process.
As a supplement to the many other useful resources out there, we’ve put our heads together to create a website upon which to share our journeys and others. We’ve called it The stoPCock Club. Take a look at the website to find out why www.stopcock.club
Please feel free to have a browse around the site. It currently holds more than a few stories... there's links to support networks and several useful scientific papers. We will add to all of these contents as we progress. We'd love it if users of this community could benefit.
As the partners of PC sufferers are often the overlooked backbone, we have asked ours to write and share their perspectives. We've also invited a few contacts to do theirs and they are working on these right now - so expect to see more stories popping up in the coming weeks. If you feel your particular PC experience would be beneficial to share, please make contact and we can add it to the site. It can be as short or as long as you feel, as serious or as light-hearted as your personality dictates. It's all about sharing and supporting. And - as you will see - there are absolutely no authoring qualifications needed!
We've also created an Instagram feed - https://www.instagram.com/the.stopcock.club/
We hope you recognise the value of such a resource in raising awareness, sharing personal experience and helping to guide others. Please reach out to myself or (Chippers) with any thoughts, feedback or questions.