Owen Thomas, a long-term volunteer for the local Cancer Society, said he remembered the first diagnosis of prostate cancer in early 2019.
He had reported to his GP "muscle pains", which he initially associated with physical activity outdoors.
"I went to the doctor on January 15 and it was April 3 before they found out that it was cancer.
"The symptoms sometimes can be very misleading or hard to diagnose.
"To be honest, it wasn’t such a big surprise to me because I thought to myself, ‘it’s probably going to be something like that’, you know. But it is still quite confronting because our age group, when we were teenagers, when anybody got cancer, that was their sentence."
Mr Thomas, 70, said the service from Health New Zealand Te Whatu Ora Southern was excellent.
"They got on to it pretty quick. It was stage 4 by the time they found it. So it had spread from the prostate through into my spine, my ribs, my shoulder blades."
It took six separate rounds of chemotherapy to "clean it all up".
"The chemo is pretty tough and a couple of times in the real bad periods, you know, it wouldn’t have worried me if I didn’t wake up in the morning. It was pretty grim.
"But by the end of 2020, I was just about back to normal.
"I could do most things, but I ran out of puffs real quick. But I have to have injections every three months and the injections are to block your body from making testosterone, which is what the cancer feeds on."
Despite getting the all-clear from doctors in early 2021, he and wife Christine felt in limbo.
"So the wife, the good wife Christine, suggested that we sell the house, buy a caravan and bother off," Mr Thomas said.
A trip to Blenheim for the first time followed, but the grand excursion around the South and North Island had to be cut short - after a regular check-up with the doctor found lung cancer.
"That was terminal because of where it was. There was two lots, one in my lungs and one at the bottom of the windpipe, and they couldn’t operate on it.
"So they gave me more chemo because it worked pretty good the first time and it shrunk the tumour quite a bit and held it steady."
It was the second bout of cancer that was the most unsettling for him, as they had already changed over most of the property arrangements to Christine.
"We made a lot of arrangements so that Christine wouldn’t have to worry about it after I was gone.
"We’d even had my funeral arranged, things like that."
Mr Thomas recommends anyone with a cancer diagnosis visits the Cancer Society, as it had the resources and people to pull someone through.
He urges men with persistent pains to get them checked out.
