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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
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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. It’s a very warm and fuzzy feeling I have every day when I can see the work that I’m actually doing play a big part in people’s lives.
Joe: Absolutely, Darrel, that’s fantastic. You’re obviously doing some fantastic work, specifically working with men, Darrel, what’s different about men facing cancer? Do we have different needs? Do we express things differently?
Darryl: No and yes. No, we don’t have different needs, in that, we want to not be diagnosed with cancer, that we want to not need to be treated and we want to live rather than die. The differences are more in the realm of concrete stuff. Like it or not, in 2018, men are still the primary income creators of a family or if they’re living by themselves, they’re taking care of themselves. Most of society around the world is still patriarchal, there are very few matriarchal societies. There’s a certain sense of: I have to take care of this, that women diagnosed with cancer don’t feel. Then there are myths around this. Like, men don’t speak about cancer or men have to be strong and not admit that they’re ill and such. Over the 20 years that I’ve been working with men and cancer,
I’ve just found that not to be true. People talk about it a lot and people will use that as an excuse to not treat men equally, as well as they treat women with cancer. In fact, men cry just as much as women do, men get depressed, men express themselves when they’re asked to. The problem with me is, it’s not so much that it’s a man who has cancer, but it’s the way people react to a man with cancer. It’s more likely that any male or female doctor will speak to a woman and ask her how she’s feeling. It’s rare that a male or female doctor will ask a man diagnosed with cancer how he’s feeling. That, I think, are some of the critical differences.
Joe: Yes, definitely. They always assume that you don’t want to talk about it.
Darryl: Yes, in fact, why am I sitting here if I don’t want to talk about it? I’m in your office, I’m paying you an amazing amount of money, either through insurance or out of my pocket. I’m here, you be here, too.
Joe: Yes, absolutely. I guess from experience, I can say that most people feel completely overwhelmed when they’re facing cancer. What advice would you give to someone who’s going through it right now?
Darryl: You’re human, feel whatever you’re feeling. It’s ridiculous to say to someone, “Feel better than you do or feel X, Y, or Z” because that’s your idea of the best thing to tell them, or the best thing for them to feel like. Somebody just told you, you have a good chance of dying sooner rather than later. Your reaction is just as valid as anyone else’s. The second thing is, after you get through those feelings, then you have to figure out what you want to do about the cancer itself. It’s a disease and it’s real.
We’re still in medieval times when it comes to treatment. There are no real cures for pretty much all of the cancers that are out there. There are only things that we can do to delay the onset of death. That’s really a good way to think about it, how to turn cancer into a chronic disease, rather than a deadly disease.
Joe: Absolutely, Darrel. One thing that’s helped me is going onto specific cancer forums. I’ve been on testicular cancer forums a lot and I’ve been asking about symptoms and I’ve been asking all kinds of things about how this affects my sex-life, and everything else. It’s been incredibly important. I found that immersing myself in facts, immersing myself in information has tremendously helped me to deal with it better. Do you notice, in the work that you do, that this kind of understanding, I think what you just mentioned, understanding the facts, understanding treatment, understanding what’s going on around you can help you to deal with it better?
Darryl: Completely. When you’re in the dark, you stumble on things, when you’re in the light, you can find your way through things. That sounds like a silly cliché, but I think it’s very truthful around understanding cancer. Where is the person who really understands what cancer is about, unless you went to med school or something? To know something that relaxes you, takes a lot of tension off. Then that gives you the tools in order to talk to your doctors. Like, when you had testicular cancer, I’m guessing you had more than one doctor. I’m guessing you also had nurses and oncologists and all sorts of people playing out in your lives.
Then you had people telling you, “Did you talk to this or that?” Then you had the online communities perhaps suggesting X, Y, or Z. To be able to feel confident in your own treatment choice-making is really a big deal. Also, it gives you the sense that you did the best you could, no matter what the outcome is. When your head is on your pillow for the last time, you shouldn’t feel a sense of regret that you blew an opportunity or something, you should know you did the best you could, it’s unfortunate that we’re not in the year 3018 instead of 2018. We just have the tools that are available for us today to fix ourselves. They’re not all that great. We do the best we can.
Joe: Yes, absolutely. You mentioned the pressure on the man to the primary welfare provider. What advice do you have on dealing with that sort of pressure?
Darryl: It’s pressure. There’s not really much you can do about it. Cancer is expensive. There’s no cheap way to deal with disease and cancer is one of the most expensive diseases to treat. Financial toxicity is as much a side-effect from cancer as being bald or feeling fatigues. When you don’t have the money to take care of yourself or your family, or when you’re put in a horrible position of having to choose, do I pay for this drug versus put food on the table? That’s a stressor that there’s just no way around.
Definitely here in the United States, where we don’t have national healthcare and such. Where many people who are economically deprived or don’t have large incomes, that are really just dying sooner rather than later because they just don’t have the cash to pay for treatment. With our current administration, obviously, it doesn’t look like that’s getting any better.
Joe: Yes, absolutely. What do you think about the support that folks expect to get from their family, their friends, from people around them, maybe their co-workers? Do people generally get the support that they need? Could they do something differently to maybe speak up, to get better support?
Darryl: Yes, certainly, pretty much everyone around you will either stick with you or they’ll run away. It’s usually one or the other. It’s rare that someone’s in the middle ground. The ones that run away, don’t chase them. They’re wherever they are and they’re not going to be helpful to you, they’re dealing with whatever’s going on for them, as a consequence to you being diagnosed with cancer. The ones that are with you, they’re your friends, they’re your family, they’re not doctors.
They’re not going to know what to say or how to make you feel better, except in the sense that they’ve done that well in the past. If you had a friend who was soothing during a relationship that went wrong three years, or helped you through a broken leg, that’s probably a friend who will know how to talk with you around cancer. If you have a family member who wakes up an extra hour early to help you get to the toilet or whatever, that’s somebody who’s useful. No one is ever going to be perfect. If you do ask somebody who absolutely knows the best things to say and is the most comforting creature on earth and all of that. Either that’s your dog or that’s an extraordinary person in your life. We’re all people and we all have human reactions to hear about cancer. There’s no right or wrong about it, it’s just the way it is.
A lot of people live alone. In the United States, it’s like 49 percent of all adult males over the age of 40 live alone. That’s extraordinary. I didn’t know that until about two and a half/three years’ ago working on a research thing on being single and having cancer. Loneliness is a consequence of cancer, as well. Imagine living alone and then you have this disease that people say, “Who do you have to talk to? Or who do you have to take care of you?” When you don’t have anyone.
Joe: That’s a staggering number, Darrel. It kind of wakes you up a little bit. I remember when I was on the forums and I was going through treatment and there was a guy there saying, “Look, I’m just about to start chemo, I don’t know what to expect, should I be freezing meals and putting them in my freezer because I live by myself and I really don’t know whether I’ll be able to get out of bed and just buy basic groceries.” I remember that shocked me. I thought, people are dealing with cancer and treatment on this level, where it’s loneliness.
Darryl: Yes.
Joe: Darrel, when we flip that around and if we talk about the caregivers, like, I guess if you’re a partner or a close friend and it’s someone in your family, because it’s really tough for them, what can you do to make it easier for them? How can you help them through this time which is incredibly stressful?
Darryl: There are two answers to that. One is, so what? It’s like, now’s your time to be selfish, at least for a small part of your diagnosis, certainly the early days you should be, or you have the permission to be selfish. It’s a good question, especially for people with children. I mean, young children, like, nine/ten-year-old’s, what do you say or not say? There are no clear answers to that. The thing to suggest to people is, what kind of situations did you have that were somewhat similar or were remotely similar and how did you behave with your kids or your family members then.
Then just repeat that with a higher context of having cancer. Really, there’s no clear answer to that. Family members, the dynamics of your family and friends hasn’t changed from the day before your diagnosis, to the day after. In the sense that, if you didn’t like them then, you’re not going to like them now. If they didn’t like you, they’re not going to like you any better because you’re diagnosed with cancer. Cancer diagnosis happens within the middle of many changing changes in relationships, both with kids, as well as adults.
All of this returns to the fact that we’re human. There’s a certain relaxation about that, that you’re not going to get this right or wrong. You’re just going to flow through it. The better posture is to understand you’re going to make mistakes with everyone, but that’s okay because there’s no rulebook around this.
Joe: Yes, absolutely. I love what you said about being selfish, I completely agree with that. It’s something that I’m almost afraid to admit to myself, but this is a good thing to be.
Darryl: Yes. Being selfish is also a way to being very clear as to what your needs are. One of the problems that caregivers have is not knowing what the diagnosed person actually really wants or needs. If you’re 100 percent selfish, you’re very clear as to what you need.
Joe: Yes.
Darryl: That helps the other person, who will either decide, “Well, I’m going to help this person out or I’m going to think they’re an ass and walk away.” Clarity is a good thing. In most cases.
Joe: Yes, absolutely. Darrel, what are some of the other challenges that typically get overlooked when we talk about cancer?
Darryl: Well, money we talked about, emotional life in terms of feeling loved, even if you live alone to know that you love yourself, that you didn’t cause your cancer. I think one of the big things around cancer is that I make my own cancer. That’s kind of rare. If you live in a toxic wasteland or in Chernobyl, yes, you did screw yourself, sorry about that, but you did. Rarely, somebody caused their cancer. That’s important to know and to feel comforted by, that you didn’t do it to yourself. Well, 20 years’ ago, I started the field of LGBT cycle oncology. Nobody had been looking at gay and lesbian cancer survivors.
Many doctors were asking, what did they do to cause their cancer? As if gay and lesbian patients did something different than straight patients around cancer diagnosis. The obvious thing around prostate cancer, did the anal receptive sex cause your prostate cancer. I can point to half a dozen urologists today that believe it does, including a very well-known one in Washington. That’s crazy but people will take their prejudices and insert it into their specialties around cancer. The sense of blame or blaming is probably one of the least talked about and most-toxic aspects about being diagnosed, I think.
Joe: Yes, absolutely. What is the reality like, if you’re gay and lesbian, I guess if you’re a gay man and you have prostate cancer, what is that reality like and what would you say to that person?
Darryl: Well, it’s hard to talk to your doctor, basically, you have to find a way to either have a doctor that you’re very cool with or you have to find your own strength to say, “I enjoy sex with other men, what will my life be like after treatment? What will my sense of identity be like?” Since most prostate cancer treatments cause impotence or remove sex drive. What will that be like for me as a man who enjoy sex with other men, since I’ve basically been out as that identity? One of the treatments for prostate cancer is quite similar to the punishment that gay men used to receive in the 40s/50s/60s, which is to take androgen deprivation therapy and to basically have your testosterone removed, so you’re basically chemically castrated.
Now, it’s a treatment for advanced stage disease and pretty much everybody welcomes that because it seems to have a good effect and adds a couple of years to your life, but imagine being a gay man and saying, “Here’s this treatment that, if you were arrested in the 1960s, we’d offer it to you, as well”? There are all sorts of weird things around that. I fail to understand how in 2018 we can have so many doctors who a, don’t care enough to learn more about their gay patients, and two, are just afraid to speak to their gay patients and ask them, what do you need from me? What kind of sensitivity or treatment or what better explanations for treatment do you need from me? On one hand, it’s good that the field of LGBT oncology is growing.
It’s big in Australia. Prostate Cancer’s Foundation of Australia is very, very good around gay men. There are a couple of universities that we hear male care work with that have fairly strong research. We can tell gay and bisexual men and transgender women, that there’s science behind a lot of what we now know around gay and lesbian survivorship. It’s still a decade or two away from being a fair and equitable medical treatment for LGBT cancer survivors.
Joe: Yes, absolutely. Darrel, please tell us about your LGBT cancer project, what’s that about and what are some of the issues that really need to be spoken about out loud?
Darryl: The LGBT cancer project started in late 2004. It’s literally the world’s first non-national, non-profit organization or NGO focused on gay and lesbian and transgender and bisexual cancer survivors, from a patient’s point of view. There are many cancer-focused organization, from Live Strong and Prostate Cancer UK. You could name a thousand. This was literally the first in the mid-2000s. Imagine how long it took to get there. That it took me, which, really, I’ve never been an activist in the gay community, it took me until my 30s to put that together. It was something that people disliked me for initially. Now, it’s been replicated in the UK and a number of other countries. I think the value of it is obvious. It’s necessary. The LGBT cancer survivor community needs an organization that can provide both advocacy and the marketing of the idea that it’s this unique niche of people that have particular treatment needs.
Joe: Yes, obviously, a lot of the folks you deal with, they feel that they’re in trouble. Is there a story, Darrel, that has really hit home the most for you?
Darryl: They were all poignant. I’m still flattered and like the idea of when somebody writes and email saying, “Thank you” and this and that. That’s highly gratifying and encouraging. Not just for me, but I don’t work alone, but a lot of people that work with me, not just in our organization, but there are lots of other organizations that have similar programs now. Nothing really strikes home in the sense that I don’t want to say one person’s extraordinary story is more important than another person’s banal story.
They’re all important because we’re all individuals that have stories. They’re all worth hearing, whether it’s like, “Thank you. I learned about a particular drug that was helpful.” Versus a story where a lesbian couple fighting their way through a hostile system, so that one could visit the other, in the same way that a heterosexual man and wife could visit. We actually had a couple of them like that. They’re all important stories. That’s how it should be. Stories are good for fundraising and good for media and this and that but, in fact, everybody, individually, has the same value and I think that in itself is the main story that we want to tell, is that everyone is important.
Whether you’re going to die in three days in complete agony or you have a manageable disease that you’ll die from a heart attack when you’re 100. If you’re diagnosed with cancer, you’re not in a good place. That’s important for both ends of the spectrum.
Joe: Yes, I guess the thing that rings through from what you’re saying is equality. People want to be treated differently in all walks of life and that includes cancer, right?
Darryl: Yes, everyone is different. Whether you’re in a refugee camp in Rwanda or in Syria, or you’re in the highest income neighborhood in New York City. It’s not that you’re in a better situation or worse situation, it’s that you’re in a different situation, with different needs and different abilities to access healthcare, and a different understanding of what healthcare is. Cancer is cancer for everybody. It may be slightly understood better here or there and certainly there are different levels of intelligence among people. Somebody who went to Harvard law school is probably going to be able to read stuff better than somebody with a third-grade education or something. That obvious stuff aside, everybody is the same, you don’t want to hear that you got a disease that can kill you.
Joe: Yes, absolutely. Darrel, I don’t know if you also started Cancer Match, which is a dating site for cancer survivors. It got me thinking that my partner was really incredibly supportive for me, but not everyone is so lucky. Like we talked about, one way or another, folks end up in the position where they want to meet someone who really gets them, who they love. You must have really also felt strongly about that, to start Cancer Match.
Darryl: Yes, it’s basically a dating site for cancer survivors. Cancermatch.com. Also, cancermatch.org goes there, as well. The idea that when you’re dating, you sit down, and you tell the person opposite you, “I do this, I do that.” You tell them you have cancer, that’s like, “Where’s the check? I got to go to the toilet and never see them again.” When you have two cancer survivors dating, you both know that when you say you’re feeling nauseous, it’s not because they look bad tonight, it’s because you’re feeling noxious, or you have a headache or something.
Or, imagine a date where you go to the doctor together and you hang out in the waiting room. You find different strategies to enjoy your lives together. That was the original idea. You know, that you don’t have to explain so many different things that are scary to people who are not diagnosed. It’s worked out brilliantly. We’ve had marriages out of that thing. There are usually about 800/900 people that are active every day and every year, there are about 8,000, or 9,000 last year, new people signing on. It’s not the largest dating site in the world.
Joe: Thank god for that.
Darryl: Yes. Nice to be here, sorry you’re here. Yes, it’s super cool. If that were the only thing I did in my life, I’d be very happy.
Joe: That’s fantastic. Darrel, tell me about Cancer Graph, how did this come about? Why do we need it?
Darryl: Cancer Graph is a mobile app. It’s 13 months’ old now, we launched it in January of last year. It came from the idea that symptoms and side-effects are hard to keep track of. There aren’t symptom and side-effect recording apps, in fact, predated ours. None of them were very easy to use. None of them created a graph that showed the progression of symptoms, so you could visually see, “I had a toothache on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. Or I was feeling nauseous three days in a row”, or whatever. What it also does it, directly connect with your doctor. If, indeed, you are nauseous three days in a row, your doctor can call you up and say, “You ought to drink some water because you’re at risk of dehydration.”
Believe it or not, that kind of app didn’t exist until I came up with it, actually, and we developed it here. Now, it’s been used for a while, it’s been written about in peer-reviewed journals. The Landslide had a really favorable article about it. It’s in China. We have to translate it in Chinese, Italian, a couple of other languages and some more to come. It’s remarkable how Cancer Graph has taken hold of the world of cancer survivors. Doctors are recommending it to patients and such. When you sit with your doctor, the doctor hasn’t seen you for a month or two months and they say, “How are you doing?” You’ve got 30 seconds to spiel out what it is you’ve been feeling.
Instead, you can actually hand that doctor a piece of paper or have it sent directly to their office. They can see, here are specific days, times, and locations where you’ve felt a very precise way. I had a moderate sense of pain in my hip. I had an extreme sense of neuropathy in my right hand. My eyesight was fuzzy for three days in a row or something, three weeks’ ago. You can’t remember that stuff. Nobody is good at keeping diaries. I have yet to meet anyone in my life that’s ever kept a diary.
I’m sure there is someone, but I haven’t met them yet. The nice thing about Cancer Graph is, it’s designed so well that it literally takes seconds to record anything that you’re experiencing. Mobile phones are in our pockets or on our bed strands or laying by our side, everything can be recorded easily. Even if you blow off a third of what your experience is, you have two thirds of recordings to show your doctor. Those things can be life-saving because they can moderate treatment.
You can change medications based on cancer prep. Particularly around prostate cancer, we have urologists and oncologists telling us, they’ve modified treatment based on the findings from their patient’s cancer graph. That’s super cool. Yes, we’re happy about that. Your audience can download it, it’s free. It’s on iOS and Android. It’s free for the world to use.
Joe: Yes, that’s fantastic, Darrel. I know that if I had dollar every time I walked out of an oncologist’s office and thought, “I should have asked him about that symptom that I was feeling three days ago, that I completely forgot about.” Yes, that definitely would be a huge help. That’s actually another way for people to find out about yourself and what you do with male care. I know that this is how I stumbled upon your good self. I actually read about Cancer Graph in the Cure magazine. I thought, I’ll Google this Darrel guy and yes, that’s how I found out about you. I go, wow, you’re doing so much more than Cancer Graph alone.
Darryl: Yes, that’s interesting because I did not know it was written about in Cure Magazine. We do get a lot of press on it. I’m a social worker. It’s not like we have a press office here, or anything. I’ll look through that, or you could email it to me. It’s good that you found it. Finding information is so much better now than it was five or ten or 15 years ago. Imagine being a cancer patient 20 years ago, before really most people had computers. You’d have a book and brochure and that’s it. Now, you have massive online communities.
We run one on a platform called: Healthunlocked.com, which everybody is welcome to. We run an anxiety support community that has over 31,000 people on it. That’s incredible. It’s a way for our doctors to learn about us as patients. To be able to look and see what people are talking about. It’s not just that the communities make better patients, it makes better doctors if they took the time to look.
Joe: Yes, absolutely, Darrel. I guess with all of this amazing work you did for male care and otherwise, all of these fantastic initiatives and projects. It must cost a lot of energy and a lot of money. How do you get funded? Do you get sponsorships? Do you partner up with people? How does this work?
Darryl: Well, all of that, but it’s the generosity of strangers. It’s, like, people will donate. I encourage your audience, obviously, to go to malecare.org and make a donation, but by serving people, people who have the wherewithal to be grateful, usually are grateful. We have the usual corporate sponsorships like any other non-profit. There’s no surprise there. I think people will be surprised with how little influence that actually causes. There’s always this idea if you take money from McDonalds, you’ll start pushing hamburgers or something.
Really, it doesn’t play out that way. I used to joke, like, I can’t be bought by half a tuna sandwich. I can’t even be bought by massive amounts of money because there’s really nothing to buy. We don’t have really anything to sell. It’s like when corporations offer us money, they like to be affiliated with an organization that does good things. If it helps McDonalds to say, “We’re helping male care and look at how good our hamburgers are really good hamburgers. Ronald McDonald is a really good guy or whatever.”
Yes, there’s nothing you can do about that. It doesn’t influence anything. Happy to take your checks, but really, most of our money comes from individual donations. Some of them are quite large but more are like two and three-figure checks or donations by PayPal or whatever. It’s not just one or two, it’s many thousands of those and they add up. Then it gives us the privilege and honor to do these really good, great innovative things that help even more thousands of people. Especially people who can’t afford to make donations. All of our work goes around the world. Also, we could not do this 20 years ago, or even ten years ago, it’s all internet bonuses, so to speak.
We can have free downloadable apps, like Cancer Graph, that all comes from individual donations from western countries or developed countries that are now benefitting patients in developed countries and underdeveloped countries, or undeveloped neighborhoods. There’s plenty of poverty in Australia, United States, everywhere. There’s a really good bonus to any donation done to an organization like Male Care. We’re not the only one but I certainly think that we’re one of the better ones. It’s an honor.
When people write a check, it’s their vote of confidence in what we’ve done and/or, it’s their gratitude for what we’ve done for them. That just makes us cry with gratitude. It’s genuine. It’s really great. Things cost money. Writing code, I mean, Cancer Graph took two and a half years to make. I did 78 iterations of it and algorithms are all you need, which is why it works so quickly. That didn’t happen overnight. A lot of people put in a lot of hours into that product. Cancer Match takes a lot of moderation. There are spammers. Stuff, to get Play Stations, that you can then convert into bombs or something.
That’s another show and a different kind of show. Being on the other side of a dating site or a community side. It’s not just about Russian escort services. It’s really like geopolitics and how to find romance. A lot of these scammers are actually behind really bad organizations that are looking for funding to create products that kill other people. There’s a lot of work involved in ferreting those guys in the now and protecting our genuine core community. All of that stuff costs money. Just because it’s time and then it’s electricity. Our server stuff is one of our bigger expenses.
Joe: Yes, absolutely, Darrel. That’s fantastic. If someone wanted to really find out more about the project you just mentioned, the ones we just talked about or even something that we missed, perhaps, or even to participate if someone wanted to be a part of it or maybe to help fundraise? What would they do? How would they get in touch with you? What sort of websites would they visit?
Darryl: Malecare.org is a good starting point. M-A-L-E-C-A-R-E.org. It presents itself initially in English, but you can see at the top part of the screen that there are a lot of languages, I think eight or nine different languages that most everything is translated in. Yes, however you got in touch with me, if you read about Male Care, you’re welcome. We love email. Being able to know what people want or what they’re suffering, helps us to figure out what to do next. We’re not an insulated community or organization. We actually reach out to people in focus group and make phone calls to people and say, “What do you need?” We don’t sit around waiting for people to tell us, but when people do tell us, that’s useful. That’s helpful for everybody. Yes, malecare.org. M-A-L-E-C-A-R-E.org.
Joe: Darrel, thank you so much. You’re an inspiration.
Darryl: That’s very sweet of you to say. Thank you.