IN JANUARY last year, rugby player Ben Nicholl took two weeks off work for what he thought would be a simple operation to remove a testicular lump.

The Grove RFC player only returned to work a year later, after months of chemo and radiotherapy to remove cancer throughout his body.

Mr Nicholl, 35, is urging men to join this year’s Wantage Race for Life for Cancer Research UK.

And the construction worker said men needed to check themselves for lumps sooner.

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“Men are rubbish,” he said.

“You say to the lads at the club do they check themselves and they say yes – but they don’t. If me going through the last year helps one person, brilliant.”

Mr Nicholl only found he had cancer after a groin injury in a match.

When the lump he thought was a swelling did not go away, he had it removed, but a week later blood tests revealed cancer had spread to his liver, lung and brain.

He started 12 week of chemotherapy at Oxford’s Churchill Hospital on February 5, but then levels started to rise again.

A tumour in his brain remained, so he had to have another course of chemotherapy.

In the middle of this, Mr Nicholl became a father, when wife Emma gave birth to their daughter Millie on May 16.

Mr Nicholl, of Nobles Close, Grove, went back to the Churchill for a blood test on March 2, and the results now look hopeful.

On Sunday, April 26, he will join the Wantage Race for Life at 9.30am, as cyclists, runners, joggers and walkers set off from the Market Place on a five or 10 km return trail to Ardington.

Entry is £20 and forms are available from Peter Ledbury electricals, KA’s Fitness and Sainsbury’s or by emailing race organiser Ray Collins on raymondcollins426@ googlemail.com