CLEVELAND — September is National Prostate Cancer Awareness Month, and a recent Cleveland Clinic survey called MENtion shows 44% of men don’t even get a yearly physical, let alone get screened for prostate cancer.
Michael Nelson has been a judge at the Cleveland Municipal Court for six years, and he was diagnosed with prostate cancer last year. He remembers his best friend and neighbor, Judge Ed Wade, who died of the disease in 2016. Nelson now sits in the same seat in the same courthouse.
“He’s a great friend of mine,” Nelson said. “We grew up together. We lived three houses from each other, and Ed of course lost his battle with prostate cancer.”
So he said there’s real motivation for him to make sure men get tested.
Nelson is doing everything he can to spread awareness for men’s health in honor of his late friend, but he also found out some good news just a few months ago.
“I didn’t realize that I was a cancer survivor until I was talking to my doctor and we were talking about the fact that cancer has been ablated, which meant it was gone, and then it dawned on me, ‘oh I’m a cancer survivor — hmm, interesting,'” he said.
While Nelson was going through the testing and procedures, he was also navigating through a lot of uncertainty. One thing that made it better was spending time playing golf with his friends.
“One thing you want to do is have support as you go through this whole prostate issue,” he said.
A weekly trip to the golf course is what helped Nelson stay in good spirits during his battle with prostate cancer, but those trips also did more than that.
“Each one of them had a story that they were holding onto about prostate [cancer],” he said.
Nelson said he discovered almost all of golf friends were going through the same thing, something Dr. Raevti Bole with the Cleveland Clinic said is normal for men to hide.
“Men might be not as used to talking about their health and really verbalizing some of the concerns or anxiety that they feel about their health,” she said. “They may not really have the language to share it.”
This is language Nelson is trying to get his fellow golfers comfortable with, and he’s committed to doing it at all costs if it means saving their lives.
“They owe it to their families and to themselves,… to make sure that they address that issue,” he said.
