Life, Illustrated with James Burns, Artist and Prostate Cancer Advocate

What I thought was so cool about the comics is that it's specific to prostate cancer, but it's kind of universal in terms of what every patient goes through.

I mean, I found that I could relate to different aspects of it, whether it was something that I experienced myself or something that I saw patients experiencing.

And,

you

know, we all have loved ones who've been diagnosed with cancer.

And so the thing about your comics is that they are so educational.

There was one part that I really liked, which was in The Death of Me, where you're talking about, basically, you reframed intimacy with your wife because everyone had this concern with you getting your treatments.

You know, this is going to affect, you know, erections.

And everyone seemed to be obsessed with that.

But you were just like...

Well, it's the least of my concerns, I guess.

But, yeah.

Which is unusual.

It really is unusual.

Yeah, because I frequent prostate cancer forums, like the Reddit forum on advanced prostate cancer.

And there's this other website that's advanced prostate cancer, but it's through malecare.org. They're the people who were distributing my comic for a while.

But a lot of people's concerns are about, hey, what will happen to my sex life? What will happen to my erections? And again, I was more concerned, hey, will I survive this? Because I figured that my wife and i have a great relationship and we've always been close and i think this has done nothing but bring us closer uh just you know it's not a sexual thing it's not it's not as much of a sexual thing uh certainly not when i was doing adt which reduces your um um What's that? Here's where I'm forgetting my words here.

Libido? Yes, thank you.

That's what I was looking for.

You know, to zero.

It just really, like, takes away all interest whatsoever.

You know, I've recovered some of that when my testosterone has come back up.

But during that time, I mean, I think, you know, Hopefully your relationship has more to do with sex.

You know, it has to do with, you know, my wife and I have been together for, you know, 37 years or something like that.

So hopefully there's something more real that holds us together than just the sexual part of it.