It was a piece of devastating news that struck the very heart of his family that finally forced Godfrey Fletcher to go to the doctor.
Aged just 47, and fit and healthy, he thought he didn’t need to get checked out.
Until one day his sister Julie called, pleading with him to visit his GP.
“My sister doesn’t usually ring me and she was telling me to start checking out myself,” the DJ says.
“That’s when she told me our dad Eric wasn’t well and he had prostate cancer.
“I had never heard about prostate cancer before, testicle cancer yes but not prostate cancer. She told me it runs in the family and I need to check myself out.
“With a white man it’s part of their culture to get a routine check-up but with black men they wait until they’re sick.”
The dad of two, from Wolverhampton, went to see his GP where he took a PSA test and had an examination.
Godfrey was then sent for a biopsy and when the results came back in September 2015 he was stunned.
“The surgeon told me he had good news and bad news so I asked for the bad news first,” says Godfrey. “That’s when he told me I have prostate cancer but the good news was it’s at an early stage.
“He explained that it was micro because we’d caught it so early and we can do something about it.”
Prostate cancer is the most common and diagnosed cancer in men in the UK.
And according to health charity Prostate Cancer UK, one in eight men are diagnosed with the disease, but for Black men the odds are actually doubled to one in four.
In total around 47,500 men every year are told they have prostate cancer which equates to 130 a day.
Godfrey, father to Jamal, 27, and Lamar, 23, became one of the 130 that day.
He says: “I was shaken. I didn’t expect to be told I had prostate cancer. I didn’t have any signs, I was fit and healthy so I really wasn’t expecting this.
“Then the realisation hit me that I had the same cancer as my 77-year-old dad and we were fighting it at the same time.
“But when I turned to him he wouldn’t talk to me. He refused to speak to me even though he was going through it too.”
Godfrey was given several options for treatment but decided to have his prostate removed in January 2016.
“I had surgery because the worry is when the cancer spreads outside the prostate,” Godfrey explains.
“After the operation I was on a catheter and when I asked the nurse if I was going to die she said they don’t get a lot of Black men in here who talk about their health.
“She’s right. We don’t. We tend to hide our illnesses.”
Unlike his father, Godfrey was very open and candid about his cancer fight.
But instead of getting support from some friends and relatives he found himself ostracised for being so truthful.
Godfrey, now 53, says: “People don’t want me to talk about it. The more I talked about it, the more I lost people.
“There’s a saying: ‘I can just tell my truth’ so that’s what I did. I told people about what happened to me.
“Keeping quiet about our health is definitely a cultural thing which has been passed down and taught through the generations.
“It’s embedded into us and someone has to break the cycle.
“One person told me I had made a mistake and was ‘mad’ because a ‘man touched my bottom’ and I was told by others that no woman would be interested in me because of my treatment.
“Some said I wouldn’t be able to have sex again.”
While Godfrey was making a good recovery and was winning his cancer fight it was a different story with his dad.
“I’d ask my dad how he was and he would talk about me and say I looked well.”
Godfrey’s dad sadly died in 2018 at the age of 80.
Recalling their last conversation, Godfrey says: “My dad looked at me and said ‘you’re living and I’m dying’.
“I could see the love in his eyes and then he told me ‘I want you to tell the world about it’.
“This was the first time he acknowledged his cancer.”
Godfrey now dedicates his spare time to educating Black men about prostate cancer and urging them to speak more openly about their health issues.
“We have to change how we get the message across,” he says.
“In the white community they use sport and in the Black community we must use a more creative process to get the
message across.
“We have to be more visual, with things like more comedies and as we love partying we should include it in music like it’s done in the US.
“Even the men who have gone through it don’t want to talk about it and I am here to change that.”
Emma Craske, a specialist nurse at Prostate Cancer UK, is urging men to come forward and get tested.
She told the Mirror: “Detecting prostate cancer early gives men the best chance of a cure, but unfortunately most men with early prostate cancer don’t have any symptoms. That’s why it’s so important for men to be aware of their risk.
“Men over 50, and men over 45 who are Black or have a family history of the disease are at higher risk of prostate cancer, and may want to speak to their GP about the advantages and drawbacks of a PSA blood test.”
