About

 Who is Major Ball Ache?

My name is Alex. I’m a 33 year old Army Officer (yes, I’m actually a Major, which really helps with the puns), living and working in London. Well, I suppose you could actually argue both of those verbs; I’m certainly not working (at least not how I’m used to), and living currently looks more like surviving!

You see shortly after completing the trek in Nepal in November (a journey I thought would be my toughest for a while) I was diagnosed with testicular cancer. But enough about that for now, I hope to cover the specifics of that - my signs and symptoms, my diagnosis and of course my treatment - in far more detail later.

Why am I blogging?

Excellent question. Truth be told, one I’ve asked myself and will no doubt continue to do so. As best as I can, here are four simple reasons I thought this might not be an entirely pointless endeavour.

Documenting my journey

This has, and continues to be a journey. At times it is utterly overwhelming, and I often find myself trawling through old WhatsApp messages or my photo gallery to remind myself where I was and what I was going through on any given day. Starting a blog seems a logical way to help organise and archive the chaos! 

Updating my friends and family

Up until now, I’ve resorted to sending updates via mass text bombardment using WhatsApp’s excellent broadcast tool. Two issues I’ve had with this: 

1) The updates I send can be quite meaty. This is deliberate. It means I can head off as many questions as possible by providing the answers up front. However, that relies on people reading the update in full! Sending lengthy messages also means I send them less frequently than many of my friends would like to hear from me. 

2) When I click send, 100+ of my nearest and dearest receive a glut of quite emotive information. This results in me receiving a glut of messages, be they well wishes, detailed questions or just a quick emoji to let me know they’ve got my back. I then lose about half a day in triaging and replying to each of them individually, often having to copy and paste the  answers to the same questions from different people. 

A blog certainly seems to alleviate those issues, hopefully serving as a regular, near-live feed for others to follow as frequently as they can stand.

Also, in my defence, a few of my supporters may have suggested my words would be worthy of a small sliver of the blogging world. I’ll leave that for you to judge.

Raising awareness

Testicular cancer is an odd one. We hear of it loads, but it accounts for a minuscule of all cancer diagnoses, even when adjusted for sex. My diagnosis certainly wasn’t straightforward, with my testicles remaining completely normal to both the trained and untrained (I hope!) eye. Not only would I like to raise awareness in the hopes that others may catch it slightly sooner, but I’d like to highlight the fantastic work of the NHS and charities working tirelessly in the fight against this and other forms of cancer.

Helping the next poor sod

So, I’ve left this till last. It’s the aspect I’m most nervous about, probably because it’s the one I care about the most but also the one which will be most difficult; right now, I just don’t have the reach to be of help. In tandem with this blog I’ve launched an instagram page (majorballache), and I aim to share the realities of my journey in the hopes they may be of use to others. Im talking reassurance of the unknown, like “What to expect from sperm banking”, to educational (tutorial on self-administering an injection for the first time), to things which may help friends and family in supporting patients (chemo-friendly recipe plans, hospital survival kits and financial hacks).

So yeah, there you have it. Hopefully you’ll find some decent reads on here whether you know me personally or not, and if you can help me to get this blog far enough into cyberspace that even one post makes cancer that little bit less crap for the next person, I will be forever grateful.

Thanks for making it this far,

Alex