Episode 004: What Is So Unique About Men Facing Cancer
Mar 16, 2018•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Episode description
In this episode, I'm talking to Darryl Mitteldorf who shares what is unique about men facing cancer and other insights and perspective from helping folks as the oncology social worker. Darryl goes above and beyond to help men who face cancer as well as the gay and lesbian community in dealing with cancer through many innovative projects delivered by Malecare, organisation founded by Darryl. Here's what you going to find out in this interview:
Crucial and unique challenges for men facing cancer
How to work through your feelings when you are diagnosed
Unveiling the biggest myth about men and cancer
The voice for gay and lesbian and transgender and bisexual cancer survivors
Why some folks run away when they found out about your cancer
Overcoming dating challenges for cancer survivors
A unique way to keep track of your symptoms and why that's crucial for your specialist
Why now is the perfect time to be selfish when you are dealing with cancer
Links
Malecare
LGBT Cancer Project
Cancer Match
Cancer Graph
Health Unlocked
Full Transcript
Joe: Hello, my friends. This is Joe Bakhmoutski and welcome to Simplify Cancer Podcast. Today, we’re going to hear from Darrel and his insights through the years he spent doing oncology social work. He has done so much incredible stuff, with helping the gay and lesbian community deal with cancer, helping the underprivileged. He created this amazing dating website for people who had cancer, and he’s had so many other great projects. Truly, Darrel is a voice that needs to be heard, so check it out. Darrel, thank you so much for doing this. First, I want to start with, I want to really ask you, why did you become a social worker and how did you become involved in oncology?
Darryl: A thousand years’ ago, when I was younger, actually, I think about 34 years’ ago, I actually left college and started working in banking. Made a lot of money in that, then took a year off, like a delayed gap year to travel around. I volunteered in a couple of refugee resettlement camps and camp back to the States where I live. I thought, what better way for me to spend my time? A friend of mine clued me into social work as a profession. Her husband was HIV positive and finally died from that. She became a social worker and I just followed her to the university that she went to, NYU. Yes, it all started from there. A very gratifying career.
Oncology, though, my dad was diagnosed with prostate cancer a few years after I had become a social worker. I started looking into that. There’s been a lot of unsettled work around psychosocial issues in oncology and cancer survivorship. I thought, rather than focus on refugees or HIV or the old stuff, where it’s already overpopulated with social workers. In the late 1990s, there were really very few American social workers looking at cancer survivorship, so I thought that could be a place I could be innovative and make a contribution to the field.
Joe: Yes, absolutely. That’s quite a change from banking into social work. It definitely feels like it’s very personal, you’re so involved. What drives you on, Darrel, what do you want to achieve in what you do?
Darryl: It’s partially revenge. Cancer took my dad’s life and the lives of a lot of people in one sense. It might even take mine one day, so far, I’m lucky, but who knows? It’s a field where you can really see tangible results, with drug addiction or refugee resettlement, you never really know what’s going to happen with a patient after you’re through with them. With cancer, they’re either happy or sad. The work that I do has very little to do with helping people live longer, but it has everything to do with helping people to live better and be happier in spite of their diagnosis and in spite of all the stressors of the stating treatments that they have to undergo.
