7: John Barnes: Why I Was Better For Liverpool Than England

Let's do the serious stuff and get it out of the way first, John.

I thought that was the serious stuff.

No, because recently you announced you got prostate cancer.

How did you find out?

I found out because, and this is quite a while ago, it's interesting how it came out.

And no matter how I found out, only because I got checked.

I mean, two of my kids are doctors.

My dad died of prostate cancer.

So, and of course, it's prevalent in the black community anyway.

So, you know, six years ago, I just started doing my PSA and my kids were like, well, you've got to get checked because I was, I don't know, 56 at the time.

So I didn't have any symptoms necessarily or anything like that.

But it's just that, as you should do, you should get checked, even if you have no symptoms.

So I got checked.

And then, of course, after being checked with the PSA being fairly high, and of course you do the very uncomfortable check as well, and it was slightly raised, your prostate slightly raised, which means nothing, because a lot of men die with prostate cancer.

Not from it, but with it, because it doesn't have to kill you.

So when I then had the biopsy, which is the ultimate test, which was terrible, where you have to take about 40 snips, and then it said, yes, you've got prostate cancer.

However, it was contained within the prostate, which means that it's fine.

It can stay in there forever.

But if it burst out, it could give problems.

So my kids said to me, two of them are doctors, said, well, why take the chance of it bursting out? It may never burst out, but it will.

So I didn't have to have the operation, but I did.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I know it became public knowledge almost accidentally, didn't it? Well, I think it was very accidentally.

But it's a good

Let's do the serious stuff and get it out of the way first, John.

I thought that was the serious stuff.

No, because recently you announced you got prostate cancer.

How did you find out?

I found out because, and this is quite a while ago, it's interesting how it came out.

And no matter how I found out, only because I got checked.

I mean, two of my kids are doctors.

My dad died of prostate cancer.

So, and of course, it's prevalent in the black community anyway.

So, you know, six years ago, I just started doing my PSA and my kids were like, well, you've got to get checked because I was, I don't know, 56 at the time.

So I didn't have any symptoms necessarily or anything like that.

But it's just that, as you should do, you should get checked, even if you have no symptoms.

So I got checked.

And then, of course, after being checked with the PSA being fairly high, and of course you do the very uncomfortable check as well, and it was slightly raised, your prostate slightly raised, which means nothing, because a lot of men die with prostate cancer.

Not from it, but with it, because it doesn't have to kill you.

So when I then had the biopsy, which is the ultimate test, which was terrible, where you have to take about 40 snips, and then it said, yes, you've got prostate cancer.

However, it was contained within the prostate, which means that it's fine.

It can stay in there forever.

But if it burst out, it could give problems.

So my kids said to me, two of them are doctors, said, well, why take the chance of it bursting out? It may never burst out, but it will.

So I didn't have to have the operation, but I did.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I know it became public knowledge almost accidentally, didn't it? Well, I think it was very accidentally.

But it's a good