Dazed, I footfall central and bead my bag. Afterwards alike adage hello, Michelle takes my face in her easily and kisses me. Like, absolutely kisses me. This is new, I think. I don’t apperceive area the accouchement are. If I accept to guess, they’ve been beatific abroad with bright instructions not to acknowledgment any time soon. Still afterwards a word, Michelle leads me up the stairs and into our bedroom. We won’t leave for hours.
Thus began the Year of Sex, an dizzying antic that put a merciful end to our connected expedition beyond the bridal tundra. Like abounding couples, Michelle and I had succumbed to the middle-age cliché of a sex-lite marriage. We aloft the kids, focused on work, paid the cable bill, and accurately afflicted the oil every 3,000 miles.
This was a acknowledgment to our aboriginal days. Michelle and I met in academy and started active calm in our 20s. For a few years, we bunked aloft a ceramics flat in rural Maine, a tiny apple with a gas station, a column office, a cemetery, and the acumen of actuality the aftermost city in America to use crank phones.
We were bankrupt but in love. Michelle formed as a potter’s apprentice, authoritative coffee mugs and quiche plates. I was a contributor for the Lewiston Sun Journal, chronicling arid boondocks affairs for $20 a story. The ceramics flat was archaic — it had an outhouse and about no calefaction — but enchanting. We’d deathwatch up on winter mornings to acquisition a attenuate frost on our blankets.
Now, two decades later, Michelle and I were married; we had two adolescent kids, a abode in the burbs, and animated jobs that larboard little time or activity for intimacy. Our son, Beckett, was 8: Hilarious, handsome, and he still put his arm about me in Stop & Shop. Our daughter, Julia, was 12: Acute and incisive. She wasn’t, as the parenting books predicted, an bugged mean-ager. Michelle was a amusing worker, allowance kids with complicated lives try to accumulate it all together. I was an brawl biographer for the Globe, which meant I tracked Matt and Ben’s every move and sometimes backward out backward bubbler characterless chardonnay at parties.
When I alternate home from the bells to acquisition Michelle waiting, wantonly, I was bewildered. What had changed? The album archetype of Fifty Shades of Grey on the attic was a clue. Michelle had consistently been a abounding clairvoyant with an appetence for erotica. But not lately. The well-thumbed copies of Anaïs Nin’s mild abbreviate belief had abolished from her nightstand years ago. Yet during a contempo ancestors vacation, she’d apparent some abominable paperbacks in our rental house, and was reminded how abundant she enjoys cuff-linked billionaires and able-bodied acreage boys alleged Hutch.
It was allegedly abandoned a bulk of time afore our sex activity returned, but the dejected books were the jump-start. “Any woman who has kids knows there’s a point area it’s no best full-body parenting, that you get a little space, physically and mentally, and you can alpha to accost genitalia of yourself,” Michelle says. “I was, like, I’m activity to alpha alive on my own libido, my own desire, because you can’t change addition else. You accept to change yourself aboriginal and acquiesce for the befalling to change.”
All I had to do now was accumulate up with Hutch. I could do that, right?
A year or so into our renaissance, a accepted claret analysis appear the achievability — aloof the possibility, my doctor fatigued — that blight was ambuscade in my prostate. He recommended I get a biopsy. Prostate cancer? Isn’t that article geezers get? I was 48. Doesn’t matter, I was told. Prostate blight is absurdly common: About 200,000 men in the United States are diagnosed with the anguish annually, and about 30,000 die from it, authoritative prostate blight the additional arch account of blight afterlife amid American men, afterwards lung cancer.
One in nine guys will be diagnosed with prostate blight during his lifetime. Abounding added accept it and don’t alike know. “If we took a hundred guys your age off the street, and magically took out their prostates, chopped it up, looked beneath the microscope,” says Dr. Mark Pomerantz, my oncologist at the Dana-Farber Blight Institute, “we’d acquisition prostate blight in a majority of them.” The accuracy is, best men will either die with prostate blight or die from it. It’s that prevalent.
I was dumbfounded. All I knew about prostate blight was that my ancestor had been advised for it, so I was at added risk. But he was old. The boilerplate age at analysis is 66. I didn’t anticipate I had annihilation to anguish about. At atomic not yet.
I started Googling frantically. I abstruse some arresting men accept survived prostate cancer, including Colin Powell, Sidney Poitier, and Robert De Niro. I activate out afterwards that Ben Stiller was diagnosed aback he was aloof 48. And that auto bodies should additionally beware. Prostate blight doesn’t affliction how you identify. If you accept a prostate — and alike auto women who’ve undergone gender acceptance anaplasty about still do — you’re at risk.
It took about two account of online sleuthing to ascertain that the primary treatments for prostate blight — anaplasty or radiation — can doom a man’s sex activity or put him in diapers. Or both. I shuddered aback I apprehend that above-mentioned to 1982 — hardly the Average Ages — every guy who had anaplasty to abolish his prostate was rendered impotent.
Every. Single. Guy.
I took a abysmal animation and stepped abroad from the computer. I’m abashed that I knew so little about prostate cancer. And I’m not the abandoned one. Best men — alike those who, like me, watched their father, uncle, or grandfathering argue with it — apperceive about annihilation about the disease. Accede this: I spent a anniversary on the Cape with 12 accompany from aerial school, all acute guys. None of them could acquaint me what a prostate is or what it does. Not one. Aback I asked my acquaintance Sam, a artist whose ancestor died of prostate cancer, what he knows about the walnut-size gland, he said: “Not a goddamn thing!”
Prostate blight kills about as abounding bodies anniversary year as breast cancer, but men don’t allocution about it. Women allocution about breast cancer. They march. They rally. They abrasion blush and antechamber Congress. Aback Betty Ford went accessible with her analysis in the 1970s, women accept aloft hundreds of millions of dollars anniversary year for breast blight acquaintance and research. Their artlessness continues to save lives as women beyond the country now get approved breast exams. The stigma that kept the anguish in the caliginosity is gone.
Men? Generally, we’re different. We’ll do annihilation not to altercate prostate cancer. Confronting vulnerabilities isn’t our thing. But it’s added than that. This disease, and its treatment, can affect the action of a man’s penis. And in a ability that equates adulthood with bound erections, that anticipation is terrifying. Booty our legs in a abominable chain-saw accident. Let some berserk beastly bite our accoutrements off. Don’t blend with the penis. Please.
Just the abstraction of abstention makes best men squeamish. You appetence to apperceive what douses sparkling banquet affair chat faster than a acknowledgment of prostate cancer? Not much. Trust me.
__________
“We’re as acutely sealed, if I can put it that way, as we’ve anytime been aback Genesis, aback we were expelled from Eden,” Stephen Fry, the British actor, author, and comedian, tells me. “We still accept this — the acceptable French chat is pudeur — this shame. There are so abounding things that a animal actuality should be abashed of: cruelty, lies, deceit, duplicity, betrayal, abuse, all the things we do wrong.
“But accepting a basal and genitals and all that pertains thereto is not article of which we should anytime be abashed and for which we should anytime apologize,” he says.
Fry’s right. In 2018, he acquaint a video on YouTube announcement that he’d been advised for prostate cancer. The 13-minute blow is frank, funny, and informative. Fry calls his blight an “aggressive little bugger,” and pinpoints the area of the pernicious gland application an admirable British-ism for penis. “It sits amid a man’s float and his old feather,” he says. Rarely had anyone announced so aboveboard about prostate cancer, let abandoned addition like Fry, who has 12.6 amateur Twitter followers. The video went viral, and the aftereffect was dramatic. Overnight, according to Britain’s National Bloom Service, there was an amazing fasten in the cardinal of men in the United Kingdom accepting their PSA checked.
I’ll abeyance appropriate actuality to say that if you’re a guy of a assertive age who doesn’t apperceive what PSA stands for, you charge to pay added attention. It’s abbreviate for prostate-specific antigen, a protein produced by the prostate gland. Doctors acclimated to await on agenda abdominal exams to ascertain prostate cancer. They’d breeze on a elastic glove, accomplish a bit of chitchat, and afresh — oof! — adit a well-lubricated feel or two into a man’s rectum, activity his prostate for adamantine $.25 that ability be a tumor. If you can’t bethink whether you’ve had a agenda abdominal exam, you haven’t.
But these probes aren’t definitive, so prostate blight generally went undetected. At atomic until men had affection (including common urination, weight loss, and aback pain), and by afresh the blight usually had metastasized and the cast was grim. That’s how bedrock ‘n’ cycle iconoclasts Aboveboard Zappa and Arch Ramone and artist Langston Hughes died preposterously adolescent of prostate cancer.
Men still abide agenda abdominal exams, but there’s a added authentic way of spotting a botheration now. Aback the aboriginal ’90s, aback studies showed a articulation amid prostate blight and an animated PSA, doctors accept acclimated a simple claret analysis to awning men for the disease. I got my PSA arrested for the aboriginal time aback I was 45. The cardinal was aerial for addition my age, but my primary affliction doctor, James Morrill, wasn’t anytime concerned. He explained that it can alter for affidavit altered to cancer. For example, benumbed a bike can accession your PSA. So can sex. Best prostate blight is additionally slow-growing. Dr. Morrill appropriate we aloof accumulate an eye on my PSA, blockage it every three months or so.
Not all doctors are so deliberate. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, abounding physicians in the United States ordered absolute biopsies aback a man’s PSA akin ticked up alike slightly. But prostate blight is pervasive: If you attending for it, there’s a able adventitious you’ll acquisition it. And that’s what happened. There was an access of prostate blight diagnoses. In abounding cases, the anguish was nonaggressive and airish no burning risk, but an untold cardinal of men, fearing for their lives, raced to get treatment.
They subjected themselves to a barbarous operation or got accursed with radiation, which larboard legions of men barren and incontinent. “Urologists and radiation oncologists abashed themselves in the aboriginal decades [of PSA screening],” says Dr. Anthony Zietman, my radiation oncologist at Mass. General Hospital. “We didn’t apperceive what we were doing. We acclimated the chat ‘cancer’ and ‘cancer’ led to analysis at a time aback the abolitionist prostatectomy was — I abhorrence to use the chat ‘barbaric,’ but I’m activity to use the chat ‘barbaric’ — and radiation was crude.
“We did an astronomic bulk of accident to an astronomic cardinal of men who absolutely should accept been larboard alone,” Zietman says.
In added words, PSA screening can advance to needless, adverse treatment. That’s why opinions alter on its value. Doctors in the United States about alpha blockage men at age 50 — avant-garde for guys, like me, with a ancestors history, or men of African descent, the citizenry with the accomplished accident of prostate cancer. Doctors in Europe, afraid about overtreatment, booty a added aseptic access to PSA screening. In England, for example, area Stephen Fry lives, the National Bloom Account doesn’t acclaim screening, abrogation it up to men and their doctors to adjudge if it’s article they appetence to do.
In my case, we watched as my PSA climbed incrementally for about 18 months afore Dr. Morrill, afraid about cat-and-mouse any longer, appropriate I get a biopsy to see what was activity on. I was afraid of dying. Of course. But what kept me up at night was the anticipation of never accepting an acclimation again. Anxiety me shallow, but that’s what I was afraid about.
Was my all-overs unreasonable? Dr. Drew Pinsky says yes. I apparent Pinsky — accepted professionally as Dr. Drew — in the ’90s aback he dispensed sex-and-relationship admonition on a late-night radio appearance alleged Loveline. In 2013, he was advised for prostate cancer. Pinsky says men’s abhorrence of the anguish is “cartoonish” because treatments accept bigger and there are agency to abate bad outcomes.
But Pinsky concedes that we’re hard-wired to assure our penises. So abundant so, he says, that one of the aboriginal things men do aback they appear out of a blackout is ability for it. Anticipate about that. “It’s so present in their neurobiology that there’s about a ambit that gets bidding as anon as alertness is in its infancy,” Pinsky says.
For me, though, it wasn’t aloof a biological impulse. There was a lot at stake. I ability alive addition 40 years. I had the kids and Michelle. And afterwards two decades of marriage, our sex activity was cranked up again. The anticipation of prostate cancer? That’s not article Hutch anytime had to anguish about.
__________
It’s a belted buzz number. I’m headed home from work, affective inches per hour in the O’Neill Tunnel, a phenomenon of avant-garde engineering that aback feels like a abundance shaft. I’m anxious. Desperate, actually. My cellphone is cavernous on the commuter seat. I should booty the call, but I don’t appetence to. It’s my doctor. I apperceive it.
Six canicule earlier, I’d been in a windowless hospital room, lying on my ancillary with my ass exposed. I’m clutching Michelle’s hand. It’s not appropriate that your apron be present aback you get your prostate biopsied, but I’m animated she is. I’ve diaphoresis through my dejected johnny, and the action hasn’t started yet. An anesthesiologist glides article akin your grandmother’s longest knitting aggravate into my rectum. A handsome, adolescent urologist explains — too matter-of-factly, it seems to me — that afterwards my prostate is numbed, he’s activity to blow 12 tiny pieces of it.
“You’ll be out of actuality in 20 minutes,” he says. “No big deal.”
“You’re not activity to buy me a alcohol first?” I joke.
Michelle and the assistant laugh. The urologist does not. Addition apparatus afresh penetrates my pelvic floor. It feels like a slow-motion stabbing. Somewhere over my accept a apparatus makes a loud acclamation complete anniversary time tissue from my prostate is snipped. Twelve acute claps. Squeezing Michelle’s hand, I authority my animation and abutting my eyes.
Afterward, as I’m putting my pants on, the assistant says my doctor will anxiety with the results. She looks at me and smiles — unconvincingly, I anticipate — and I account if she already knows.
Now, at a standstill in my car, I grab the buzz afore it goes to articulation mail.
“Hello?”
“Hi, Mark.”
It’s Dr. Morrill. He clears his throat.
“Hello, doctor.”
He doesn’t decay time. Dr. Morrill says I accept prostate cancer. And I should do article about it adequately soon.
I ataxia an abomination and acknowledge him for calling. I afresh bung the buzz on the floor.
I anchor the council caster with both easily and beam beeline ahead. I can feel my face get flush. My affection pounds. I appetence to move. Anywhere. But it’s all anchor lights.
I accept cancer.
PART 2
I never anticipation I paid absorption to accepted notions of masculinity. I’m addition who enjoys browsing big-ticket shoes online — I’ve currently got my eye on a brace of covering dress boots with a buckle. So I don’t chronicle to the arenaceous Marlboro Man or the rugged, flannel-clad adolescent carriage rocks in his pickup. I’m aloof not Ram Tough, I guess.
But aback you’re diagnosed with a anguish whose analysis could accomplish you impotent, you activate to resent the clichéd angel of the American macho — the able-bodied rake with the affecting intelligence of a freezer pack. If that’s the adult ideal, no account men don’t allocution about prostate cancer. Guys weaned on a abiding diet of Clint Eastwood movies or the boozy exploits of Don Draper don’t appetence to abide on a anguish that can abate them bottomward there. From an aboriginal age, men get the bulletin that our penis is Excalibur, and annihilation that threatens the boss sword, well, no thanks.
I’m not exempting myself. Afterwards I was diagnosed, I didn’t appetence to abide on it, either. And it didn’t action to me to go to a prostate blight abutment group. Atrocious as I was for information, I absurd sitting in a roomful of dudes, abounding of them 20 years avant-garde than me, acclamation our once-indomitable erections.
But as I was cerebration about cogent this story, I did stop by a few affairs and — assumption what — the vibe was affable and the guys magnanimous. There were mostly aging men talking, afterwards shame, about incontinence, arrect dysfunction, and, yes, feelings. They didn’t appetence to accord to this club, but they were beholden not to be alone. I affliction not activity sooner. There’s so abundant I didn’t know. Connecting avant-garde with men in my bearings would accept helped.
Instead, I advised prostate blight on my own. Aback I wasn’t advertisement and autograph belief or accumulation celebrity account to accumulate my editor blessed — anticipate Ben Affleck’s arresting aback boom — I apprehend aggregate I could about the anguish and its treatment. I was frightened, but additionally weirdly fascinated. The prostate is in there — JetBlue does not fly absolute — so how would doctors annihilate the blight afterwards damaging the blow of me?
The job of the prostate was a adumbration to me: In the aerial book of WebMD, it produces the aqueous that “nourishes and protects” sperm. In added words, the able-bodied little gland helps accomplish — and accrue — semen. How did I never apperceive this? Not that you asked, but I had my aboriginal acme in the seventh grade, afterwards award a annual in the aback of my brother’s closet featuring soft-focus photos of a ample Sophia Loren look-alike. I abject into the bath and . . . Bang! My prostate has been logging connected hours anytime since.
After my diagnosis, I was afraid about survival, yes, but I additionally wondered: Would I still be able to accept an acme if my prostate was removed? A aberrant question, I know, but it acquainted urgent.
First, though, Michelle and I had to allocution to the children. Thankfully, this wasn’t a Daddy-only-has-a-year-to-live blazon of cancer. Caught in time, prostate blight is awful treatable. About 90 percent of patients whose anguish is diagnosed at an aboriginal date alive at atomic 15 years afterwards treatment. But it’s still cancer, and no one wants to be in that 10 percent.
A few canicule afterwards the buzz anxiety from Dr. Morrill, I was alive from home. Julia, who was in eighth brand at the time, alternate from academy and we sat calm on the couch. I told her I’d had a analysis that appear article alleged prostate cancer. There are worse diseases, I explained, but I’d allegedly charge analysis and it ability be unpleasant. Julia fidgeted as her eyes abounding with tears. She gave me a hug that lasted a connected time and afresh abrupt upstairs.
The acknowledge with Beckett, who was in elementary academy and not decumbent to acknowledgment big account like mortality, was beneath intentional. At the banquet table that night, Michelle and I talked about the analysis and abutting steps. Beckett, his aperture abounding of Trader Joe’s pork dumplings blood-soaked in soy sauce, listened. The attending on his face said: Article is activity on with Dad, but, damn, these dumplings are tasty.
I acknowledge I was appealing focused on myself, so it’s adamantine to apperceive what aftereffect the account had on either of them. I acquainted like they still accepted me to accomplish them laugh, and, added generally than not, I did — at atomic for a while. But what were they absolutely feeling? I apparent afterwards that Julia wrote a vignette for an English chic about our conversation. This is in allotment what she wrote:
You told me that you had cancer. And I aloof sat there attractive at the frayed bolt of my haversack adulatory you hadn’t said those words. And adulatory you had told me annihilation else, any added abhorrent thing, aloof not that . . . Our abode became the bottle house. And you and me and mom and Beck were babyish China bowls so aerial they could blast at alike the aboriginal touch.
This is article I abstruse about cancer: One actuality in the ancestors gets it, but everyone’s activity changes.
Michelle and I are in a awkward arrangement at Mass. General Hospital, which invites afresh diagnosed prostate blight patients to sit with a surgeon and a radiation oncologist to altercate analysis options. It’s affectionate of like a job interview: The specialists explain their corresponding approaches to removing the blight — and the accessible outcomes, acceptable and bad — and the accommodating asks questions. Afore we start, the assistant arch the affair asks me to bulk my animal action today, at 48, compared with aback I was 21.
“On a calibration of one to 100,” she says.
“Hmm,” I reply. “Maybe 90?”
Silence. I attending at Michelle, who’s staring at the floor.
“Um, no,” Michelle says finally. “More like . . . low 80s.”
Fine, that’s still a B.
Some charlatans on Reddit affirm prostate blight can be convalescent by bistro a huge bulk of bluff cartilage or habanero peppers, but I’m not accommodating to analysis their claims. I’m advantageous to accept bloom allowance and several highly-regarded hospitals nearby. Michelle and I achieve that I’ve got three accepted analysis options: radiation, surgery, or annihilation at all. The aboriginal two, I’m told, will affect my animal function, at atomic temporarily. A blueprint on the bank shows how.
In the case of radiation, the atramentous Sharpie line, which I appearance as a proxy for my penis, sags steadily over a aeon of years. That’s because high-energy beams of radiation assail the cancer, but additionally annihilate advantageous tissue, which erodes authority and, potentially, causes added cancer. In the case of surgery, the bandage nose-dives, alarmingly, to aught and afresh — best case — springs aback to accustomed afterwards a year or so. Best No. 3 would be to watch and adjournment — what’s alleged “active surveillance.” I’d abide Mr. 80 Percent, at atomic until age causes its assured droop, or addition biopsy reveals added cancer. Michelle and I attending at anniversary other. How about aperture No. 4, Monty?
My ancestor had autonomous for a beneath advancing approach. He could allow to. He was 70 aback he was treated. Radioactive pellets were built-in in his prostate; it’s alleged brachytherapy. Alike if the pellets didn’t bake every bit of the cancer, the doctors said whatever was larboard was absurd to annihilate him afore article abroad did. They were right. My dad’s 84 now and accomplishing well.
He and I didn’t allege about his treatment, or the aftereffect it had on his body, at the time. (Though I do anamnesis my mother adage he complained his scrotum angry a bittersweet color.) Whenever I’d ask my ancestor how he was feeling, the acknowledgment was consistently the same: Fine. I apperceive now that’s the accepted acknowledgment from guys activity through this. Translation: I don’t appetence to allocution about it.
In arch what I should do, I had to accede not abandoned my about boyhood — I ability alive decades more, which fabricated radiation capricious — but additionally my Gleason score. That’s the allocation arrangement that doctors use to appraise the aggressiveness of a patient’s prostate cancer. Mine, on a calibration of 1 to 10, was 7, which is accounted “intermediate risk.” Michelle and I advised “active surveillance” — blockage my PSA every three months or so. But the actuation to get the blight out was powerful. We acquainted like anaplasty was the best choice.
__________
First do no harm, right? That’s the austere agreement medical acceptance accomplish aback they become doctors. But, for about a century, the adverse was done to men with prostate cancer. Generations of guys diagnosed with puny, blah blight afraid and approved advancing treatment. Unfortunately, agitable urologists obliged, assuming awkward excisions with alarming consequences.
Some patients didn’t accomplish it out of the operating room, dying of massive claret loss. Others — about 25 percent of guys who had a prostatectomy — absent float ascendancy and had to abrasion diapers for the blow of their lives. And, until the aboriginal 1980s, every man who had his prostate removed staggered out of the hospital impotent. That’s right, 100 percent. How was that possible?
Simple: Urologists didn’t apperceive any better. Prostatectomies accept been performed aback 1904, yet the abdomen of fibers surrounding the prostate had never been charted. Surgeons accepted — yes, accepted — that the fretfulness authoritative the hydraulics of the penis ran through the prostate. If your prostate was removed, abstention was aloof an adverse ancillary effect.
Enter Dr. Patrick Walsh. He apparent that, in fact, the fretfulness run alfresco the prostate. And on April 26, 1982, he pioneered a assiduous surgical action that, done perfectly, spares the fretfulness and preserves a man’s erection. Dubbed “the Michelangelo of prostate surgery” by a colleague, Walsh became article of a celebrity, the go-to urologist for high-profile men with prostate cancer. His patients included tennis brilliant Bobby Riggs; Washington, D.C., Mayor Marion Barry; King Baudouin of Belgium; and, in 2003, John Kerry, who chock-full advancement for admiral to accept his prostate taken out. In total, Walsh operated on 4,569 men during his career.
For three decades, Walsh was administrator of the Brady Urological Institute, a acclaimed hospital at Johns Hopkins University alleged for “Diamond” Jim Brady, a meaty-faced New York financier who, in 1912, ancestral a array of money to Hopkins afterwards its doctors austere an obstruction in his float application a medieval-looking rod with a alarming angle at the end.
It’s a account that abandoned Brady’s float was obstructed. Legend has it “Diamond” Jim could bottomward two dozen oysters, six lobsters, two canvasback ducks, a sirloin steak, and two bowls of blooming turtle soup in one sitting. “He was already told of a Texan with a abundant appetence whose admired affair was a 30-pound turkey blimp with chestnuts,” Walsh tells me during a arrangement to the convention in Baltimore. “And Brady said, ‘How abounding can he eat?’”
I’d never heard of Walsh afore I was diagnosed, but as Michelle and I researched our options, his name kept advancing up. Oncologists and surgeons we met with batten of him with an account adjoining on awe. At 82, Walsh no best operates, but he casts a connected shadow. At the Brady Institute, his account hangs alongside an oil painting of the hospital’s aboriginal director, Hugh Hampton Young, who’s advised the ancestor of avant-garde urology because he performed the aboriginal prostatectomy.
In person, Walsh is affable and live-wire alert. He advisers adolescent medical acceptance and still checks in with men whose prostates he removed. “I gave anybody my home blast number. I talked to them every three months for the aboriginal year [after surgery] and I abide to chase them to this day,” says Walsh, cutting a breakable white lab covering and arrant tie. “That’s 20,000 blast conversations I’ve had with people.”
Walsh fabricated his arresting analysis on February 13, 1981 — his 43rd altogether — while visiting a friend, a retired urology professor, in the Netherlands. Instead of touring windmills, the two men proceeded to a laboratory, area they dissected an babyish bladder. Walsh asked his acquaintance if he knew where, precisely, the diminutive fretfulness amenable for erections are located.
“He said, ‘I’ve never looked,’” recalls Walsh.
Together, they did.
“And three hours later, there they were — alfresco the prostate. So bingo!” Walsh says.
Walsh has told this agent adventure abounding times over three decades — at endless medical conferences, to aeon and patients, on TV allocution shows — and yet as he and I are sitting calm in the Brady Institute’s small, wood-paneled library, he’s on the border of tears. “You can brainstorm if God installed these fretfulness in Adam, and no one had been able to acquisition them up to this moment, this was an important finding,” he says, his articulation trembling.
I’m speechless. It turns out this man of science is additionally a man of faith, a adherent Catholic who believes he was accustomed the albatross to be the easily of God — absolutely — in the operating room. On his arrangement wall, Walsh has a affected book depicting an operating allowance aflame by Christ’s halo. The surgeon in the painting is continuing over the patient. Beside the surgeon, allegorical his scalpel, is Jesus.
“If you appetence to beat what seems to be an cureless and brave disease, those who do best absolutely are alleged by article higher. There’s a college purpose,” says Dr. Jonathan Simons, an oncologist in Santa Monica, California, and the admiral and CEO of the Prostate Blight Foundation, which has aloft added than $830 amateur to abutment analysis about the world. “Pat is a very, absolute committed Roman Catholic — decidedly in the Jesuit faculty of account to those in medical need.”
Walsh tells me he was “chosen to attending afterwards God’s accouchement with prostate cancer,” and the after-effects accept been acceptable — for everyone. “When [my patients] assuredly die, their wives address me admirable letters,” he says. “’Dr. Walsh, every time we fabricated love, we thanked God for you.’”
The nerve-sparing procedure, which Walsh fine-tuned over 30 years, is now the way prostatectomies are done. But amid the prostate from disparate fretfulness the bore of a animal beard is aerial work, and not all doctors are created equal. For me, award a abundant surgeon — addition who’d performed the operation not hundreds of times, but bags — was critical. And I abstruse I could admonition myself, too. Doctors told me the allowance of actuality almighty and abstemious afterwards anaplasty would advance with kegels.
Don’t apperceive what a kegel is? Anytime clenched your basic to abstain casual gas in a awash elevator? You’ve done a kegel. It’s a pelvic attic exercise. Stephen Fry did them afore his surgery. He compares it to aggravating to aces up a Ping-Pong brawl with your anus. I got absolute acceptable at kegels. I did them all the time. I’m kegeling appropriate now.
The nerve-sparing anaplasty is done in one of two ways. The alleged accessible acclimation involves a ample cavity beneath the axis — enabling the surgeon to get a acceptable attending at what Walsh calls the “precarious terrain” about the prostate, and allowance abundant to carve out the gland by hand. The automatic acclimation is beneath invasive and the accretion time shorter. The surgeon pilots mini automatic instruments anesthetized through keyhole-size incisions in the abdomen.
Michelle and I met with three surgeons. In the end, we chose Dr. Adam Kibel, the arch of urology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. Kibel was an aboriginal adopter of the automatic method, and he’d performed the operation a few thousand times. (My abandoned anxiety was the trademarked name of the robot: the da Vinci Surgical System, which sounds like a bad ’80s band.) We admired Kibel abandoned — he’s a nerd, in the best faculty — and he’d spent two years training with Dr. Walsh at Johns Hopkins. If I couldn’t get Obi-Wan Kenobi to abolish my prostate, I capital one of his Jedi aggregation accomplishing it.
Still, I was a bones aback Michelle and I accustomed at the hospital afore aurora one morning in February 2014. I’d done my homework, but I had no abstraction how this was activity to go. Michelle gave me a kiss and I was wheeled away.
When I came to, I was captivated in a balmy blanket. A apparatus had rummaged about my pelvic attic for two hours. I acquainted befuddled and wracked. Kibel told Michelle the action went well, but, he said, ominously, my prostate was “boggy” — by which he meant mushy. That fabricated a absolute abstraction difficult. “People anticipate the prostate is amidst by Saran Wrap, and you aloof accept to bark off the Saran Wrap,” Kibel says. “It’s not like that. The prostate ends and the added tissue begins. And, unfortunately, the added tissue is the nerve.”
He’d faced a bind in the operating room. He could accept gone added — demography added tissue — but that would acceptable accept wiped out the nerves. In such situations, Kibel says, he pauses to admonish himself what the accommodating and their accomplice prioritized beforehand. Michelle and I had been absolute that attention animal authority was important. So Kibel backward the course, demography as abundant of my addled prostate as he could while still sparing the nerves. The anatomy address would appear aback in a anniversary or so, and we’d apperceive afresh if he got it all.
I was beatific home with a catheter, painkillers, and a decree for Cialis, a medication acclimated to amusement arrect dysfunction. That’s weird, I thought. Alike if I could accept sex — and, let me acquaint you, I could not — I was in no mood. Kibel says he prescribes Cialis, or added ED meds, to access the claret breeze to the penis, which helps alleviate animal action afterwards the affliction of surgery. If it additionally encourages patients to get aback in the accepted saddle ASAP, he’s air-conditioned with that, too. “I’m alleviative a accommodating who has prostate cancer,” he says. “But aback the accommodating has animal dysfunction, you’re alleviative the couple.”
__________
At home, Michelle tries to accomplish me comfortable, or as adequate as I can be with a elastic tube clarification my urine into a artificial Pop Tart-shaped bag. She fixes me yogurt parfaits and gives me connected bottom massages. We’ve put a television in our bedchamber for the aboriginal time and are binge-watching The West Wing. I’m acquisitive that Aaron Sorkin’s rat-a-tat chat will lift my spirits, or at atomic abstract me.
A anniversary afterwards surgery, we’re in bed watching Season 2 aback my cellphone begins vibrating. Addition belted number. It’s Dr. Kibel this time. The anatomy address isn’t great. We didn’t get it all. I sigh. We accede to allocution in a few days.
“Thanks,” I complain abominably and adhere up.
I put my easily over my face. I’d subjected my anatomy to a backbreaking surgical action and it didn’t work. Now, I’ll accept to abide months of radiation and hormone therapy. It feels like starting over.
I about-face off the television and, with no abstraction how bad it’s about to get, activate to cry.
PART 3
In those assured “why me” moments, I wondered if I’d done article to allure cancer. Your apperception goes to aberrant places in the average of the night. Had I fabricated my prostate addled as a boyhood by blaze the adult passages of my mother’s album archetype of Erica Jong’s Abhorrence of Flying? Had all those abandoned comedy dates with the Sophia Loren look-alike larboard me vulnerable?
Well, no. What I’ve abstruse is there’s no one account of prostate cancer, but some men do accept added acumen to anguish than others. I was one of them. My ancestor had the disease, and ancestors history is a cogent blow factor. So is race. Atramentous men are 76 percent added acceptable to advance prostate blight than white men and active as acceptable to die from it. Why the anguish hits Atramentous men so adamantine isn’t absolutely bright — abiogenetic susceptibility and diet comedy a role — but the actuality that they die at bifold the bulk of white men is appalling. If we apperceive Atramentous men get the anguish disproportionately, why is their bloodshed bulk still so high?
I ask Tom Farrington, who’s been adopting the anxiety about prostate blight in the Atramentous association aback his own analysis two decades ago. A retired IT controlling in Boston, Farrington is architect of the Prostate Bloom Education Network, a nonprofit alive to abate the ancestral alterity in analysis and death. The sad truth, Farrington says, is that best Atramentous men accept no abstraction they’re at aerial blow for prostate blight and, as a result, don’t get their PSA checked. Farrington concedes he didn’t apperceive — alike admitting his ancestor and both grandfathers died of the disease.
And if they do know, he says, abounding Atramentous men will adjournment activity to a doctor. Often, that’s because they abridgement insurance. But also, Farrington says, it’s because Atramentous men anchorage a abysmal apprehension of the bloom affliction system. Some still bethink the baleful and base Tuskegee syphilis study, aback the US Accessible Bloom Account accustomed hundreds of Atramentous men with syphilis to go basic — for 40 years — so scientists could abstraction the abiding furnishings of the disease. “I would absolutely use the chat ‘suspicion,’” Farrington says of the attitudes of Atramentous men against the bloom affliction system, abacus that providers and hospitals can — and should — do added to brainwash Atramentous men about the blow they face.
I agree. But men buck some responsibility. We can and should brainwash ourselves. The abhorrence to allocution about prostate cancer, for whatever reason, is an catching all its own. If I’d been able to affected the amateurishness of talking to added men in my situation, I would accept been bigger off. I would accept accepted what to expect. No question. “Silence kills,” Farrington says. “Silence absolutely kills. If you’re silent, not abandoned are you not sending out information, you’re not accepting admonition back. And that abridgement of ability kills.”
Of all the things I didn’t know, the aberrant accord amid testosterone and prostate blight was the best surprising. I had no abstraction that the macho sex hormone that gives men billowing biceps, anatomy hair, and, if we’re lucky, a articulation like Lou Rawls, is the aliment that prostate blight needs to grow. I abstruse what that meant aback Michelle and I sat bottomward with Dr. Kibel a few weeks afterwards surgery.
He said there was a adventitious that the blight had able the allowance of my prostate so I’d charge radiation analysis — bristles canicule a anniversary for seven weeks — to eradicate whatever rogue beef survived the operation. But he capital to wait. Wait? I wasn’t in any bustle to corruption my anatomy added — this time with X-rays aimed at my nether arena — but I was atrocious for this daydream to end.
In cases like mine, Kibel explained, it’s best to assault the extra blight aback the beef are at their weakest. First, he said, we bare to abolish testosterone from my anatomy to abjure the cancer. Afresh we’d bead the bang with radiation.
Hello, manopause. With a distinct attempt of a testosterone acquaintance alleged Lupron, injected in my backside, I’d be briefly castrated. That’s the chat he used: “castrated.” Lupron would acclimation my pituitary gland, which is amid in my brain, to arrest assembly of testosterone by my testicles, which are amid beneath my added brain. I was warned there could be affection swings and hot flashes. I ability lose beef accumulation and memory. I ability accretion abdomen fat, abound breasts, and my joints may ache. My testicles could compress to the admeasurement of chickpeas. My account would about absolutely vanish, and so ability my anatomy hair.
I was abashed by the bogeyman of Lupron, but, honestly, I was additionally perversely analytical to see what would happen. Afterwards testosterone, would the abstraction of agrarian sex with my wife be no added aesthetic than active the dishwasher? In a word, yes.
Within a ages of the injection, my animal cravings appealing abundant disappeared. It was astonishing. I did some account and apparent that psychiatrists who amusement determined sex offenders — pedophiles, rapists, besetting exhibitionists — sometimes resort to account Lupron injections to barrier aberrant behavior. I was in bad company.
But a abridgement of sex drive was abandoned one of the ancillary effects. The hot flashes were epic. Afterwards warning, I’d be overwhelmed, as if trapped in a tiny bath with the aperture locked. At my babe Julia’s eighth-grade graduation, the awash amphitheater was like an inferno.
When, mercifully, the commemoration ended, the mob of parents and grandparents apprenticed itself into a narrow, airless hallway. Julia capital to booty photos with her friends, but I was in affliction and accepted we leave. You’ll see your accompany tomorrow, I said.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s blanket it up!’” I hollered. “I charge to go. Immediately.”
We managed to get one picture, which I acquaint on Instagram. Attractive at it now, all I see is the ache I acquired my family. Julia has her arch down. Because she’s crying.
“I don’t absolutely accept any absolute photographs of me in my dress from Anthropologie,” she says. “The best dressed up I’ve anytime been.”
That wasn’t a affection swing. It was a tantrum. Lupron angry me into a toddler. At home with my family, petty grievances — a confused car key or a ablaze larboard on — would bound clarify into full-on fury. Added times, I’d get bathetic if a drifter on a TV affable appearance broke their strudel. I acquainted pathetic, and yet I was blank to stop it.
Some men whose prostate blight is so avant-garde it can’t be convalescent by anaplasty or radiation absorb years — years — on Lupron. It buys them time by slowing the cancer’s growth. Afterwards his death, we abstruse that French Admiral François Mitterrand had been on Lupron during abundant of his time in office. That’s abysmal to me. The apple would not accept survived if I were a arch of state. There were canicule aback the fallout from hormone analysis was so acute I acquainted abandoned despair.
I eventually managed the hot flashes with acupuncture. But my affecting accompaniment was still breakable aback Michelle and I went with Meredith Goldstein, my babyish acquaintance and colleague, and her sister, Brette, to the Nantucket Blur Festival. Meredith was there partly to account amateur Mark Ruffalo, who told her he’d aloof active on to brilliant in a cine about the Globe’s analysis advertisement sex corruption by priests in the Catholic Church. “I anticipate it’s alleged ‘The Spotlight’?” Ruffalo said, apropos to closing Best Account champ Spotlight. I was there to relax on the beach. But on the aboriginal day, a attractive June afternoon, biographer and West Wing architect Aaron Sorkin was speaking at Nantucket Aerial School. Meredith knew I was a fan and encouraged me to go. Michelle was interested, so I said OK.
Big mistake. As anon as we arrived, I capital to leave. What had been billed as a chat amid Sorkin and MSNBC host Chris Matthews was aloof a agglomeration of backslapping. An connected humblebrag about the Oscar-nominated cine for A Few Acceptable Men, which Sorkin allegedly wrote on cocktail napkins in his 20s, was decidedly grating. “This guy is insufferable,” I aside to Michelle.
I was about to lose my anchor and Michelle knew it. It didn’t admonition that Meredith and Brette were backward to aces us up. They’d been adequate a few rosés at the beachside bar, abrogation Michelle and I to bake on the blacktop alfresco the school. Aback they did assuredly cull up, in a car apprenticed by an island friend, I was pacing. I’d been abiding to do article I didn’t appetence to do, and now I was furious.
I got into the car and began yelling. “You’re late! Anybody larboard and we’ve been [expletive] waiting!”
Meredith was abashed and started to cry. Brette wasn’t accepting it. She screamed at me, lunging over Michelle, who was sitting amid us.
“Meredith acquainted compassionate against you,” Brette says now. “She acquainted compassionate and she hates conflict. To see her cry, it triggered a aphotic acerbity in me and I was activity to beeline annihilation you.”
Michelle kept her arch down, easily in her lap. She was crying, too.
That night, I apologized to anybody over banquet — and a lot of wine — but, six years later, I’m still mortified. It’s an acute anamnesis and it consistently will be. Aback I see Brette now, I hug her tighter than anyone else.
“It was abundantly validating,” Michelle says now. “Brette was speaking what I was thinking. I was, like, ‘Thank you. I’m animated I’m not crazy.’ What she said in that moment was, ‘I don’t accord a bits if you accept hormones or this or that, you cannot amusement bodies like this.’”
___________
With my testosterone gone and the blight in retreat, I started radiation analysis in July 2014. Every weekday morning for seven weeks, I showed up at Mass. General Hospital, afflicted into a gown, and took a bench with others waiting, joylessly, for their circadian dose. Eventually, a adolescent artisan appeared and led me into a dark, cold, vault-like allowance area I lay on a table. The tech straightened my hips, trussed my anxiety with a Velcro strap, and told me not to move. Afresh she left, cautiously watching on a closed-circuit TV adviser in addition allowance as the beeline accelerator began humming.
A beeline accelerator looks like a accoutrement Scotty ability dabble with on Brilliant Trek, but it’s a apparatus that streams absolute radioactive particles into your anatomy with acute precision. Developed in the 1950s by Russell and Sigurd Varian — the Wright brothers of radiation oncology — the beeline accelerator is the courage of radiation therapy, strafing millions of blight patients with airy rays. I backward as still as I could while the accoutrement rotated about me. The alarming affair about radiation — the affair I still anguish about — is that it amercement advantageous beef in the beam’s path, which can advance to abstruse ancillary furnishings in the future, including malignancies or, in patients with prostate cancer, a abasement of animal function. I assumption we’ll acquisition out.
Over those seven weeks, my affection alternated amid bad-tempered and severe, but Michelle remained steadfast. Every morning afore radiation therapy, I’d acquisition a little allowance in my car — Gold Bond crumb for hot flashes, a book of abbreviate belief — consistently with a sweet, claimed note. Sometimes it was a composition by Galway Kinnell or Sylvia Plath; sometimes the words were Michelle’s.
The tradition, on a patient’s aftermost day of analysis at the Francis H. Burr Proton Analysis Center, is that you arena the “Good Luck Bell” on your way out the door. It’s meant to be a celebration; anybody in the cat-and-mouse allowance applauds. But I didn’t feel any delight. I rang the alarm meekly and Michelle took a picture. I couldn’t aggregation a smile.
I wasn’t assured this was over. For a year, it had been bad account followed by added bad news. It acquainted existential. Now all I could do was wait. Already my anatomy started bearing testosterone again, we’d analysis my PSA. If it spiked, that would beggarly the blight had withstood our attempts to annihilate it and was advancing anew.
I looked for agency to abstract myself. One afternoon, I went to see The Imitation Game, a cine about Alan Turing, the English mathematician acclaimed for breaking Nazi codes during Apple War II. Had I accepted added about Turing, who’s played by amateur Benedict Cumberbatch, I would accept best a altered film.
Turing, I learned, was acutely tormented, in allotment because he was gay, and homosexuality was a abomination in the UK at the time. In 1952, admitting the role he played in allowance defeat Hitler, Turing was bedevilled of “gross indecency” for accepting consensual sex with a man. He was accustomed the advantage of bastille or a 12-month appellation of hormone therapy. Sitting abandoned in the aphotic theater, I winced.
“Go to prison,” I muttered. “Please go to prison.”
He didn’t. Turing was injected with estrogen, the primary changeable sex hormone. It’s what doctors acclimated afresh to rid a man of testosterone and barrier his libido. Turing developed breasts and became impotent. Ostracized and ashamed, he committed suicide two years later.
When the lights came up, I couldn’t move. I blinked aback tears as the amphitheater emptied. What if my PSA isn’t zero? What if the blight returns? Anaplasty and radiation were no best options. It would beggarly added hormone therapy, and I couldn’t buck the thought.
__________
It’s 6 p.m. on a Wednesday in January 2015. Meredith and I are in the basement of a architecture on the Boston University campus. We’re teaching an brawl journalism class. Actually, she’s teaching it tonight. I’m in the hallway, angrily auspicious the accommodating aperture on my phone. I’d had a claret analysis that morning — my aboriginal aback analysis concluded — and the assistant said the after-effects would be acquaint by the end of the day.
The Lupron fog has aerial and my animal action is, at last, returning. But I won’t be annoyed until I see my PSA. It should be zero. It has to be zero. Over and over, I brace the awning as Meredith keeps the chic occupied. She gives them a autograph arrangement — “One Direction has burst up and you accept to column 300 words immediately. Go!” — and joins me in the hallway.
Meredith has an abstraction of what I’m activity through. Her mother, who died in 2013, was scanned periodically during analysis for colorectal cancer. “It’s a activity of, like, amuse aloof let this be zero,” she says, canonizing that night at BU. “I was a mess, and you were a mess, and yet we both had to be on.”
Finally, a “new lab result” active appears in my inbox, and I bang the link. There it is. My PSA is < .01. I beam at the number. All I can anticipate is, afterwards all the babble I’ve been through, my PSA isn’t zero. Why isn’t it zero? What does the less-than attribute mean? I attending at Meredith, who’s already Googling “PSA” and “< .01”.
When I get home, I accelerate afraid e-mails to my doctors. In the morning, Dr. Kibel responds. “It is finer zero,” he says. “This is acceptable news. Absence of cancer.” It is acceptable news. Abundant news, actually. I should be elated. But I’m not. I apperceive that “absence of cancer” and “cured” are not the same. I’ll accept to get my PSA arrested afresh in a few months, and a few months afterwards that, and afresh afresh and again, allegedly forever.
I alpha to fret, but stop myself. What am I doing? It’s not my anatomy that’s betraying me now, it’s my mind. This is the new normal. Somehow, I charge to apprentice to accord with it.
__________
I like to anticipate I’m a adequately aware guy. I apperceive there’s added to masculinity, and sex, than an erection. And yet as I waited for the boastful acknowledgment of Mr. 80 Percent, I struggled to accommodate my new and old selves. Progress afterwards treatment, alike with the aid of all-encompassing Viagra from a Canadian pharmacy, was apathetic and unsteady.
My aboriginal post-prostatectomy acme was a admonition that I’m not, in fact, the aforementioned man I acclimated to be. Remember, the prostate produces the aqueous that protects agent — in added words, semen. No prostate, no semen. Makes sense, but I don’t anamnesis my doctors anytime absolutely cogent me that. As a result, I was abashed — and a little afraid — that aboriginal time. The awareness was absolutely the same, but it was dry. Annihilation came out. Ghost-jaculate!
How did Michelle feel about the new me? What were her expectations? She insisted she didn’t accept any, alike as she connected to apprehend books with titles like Calefaction Seeker and Tempting the Beast. She knew article I hadn’t absolutely accepted: Sex at 50 doesn’t attending like sex at 21. I should appearance this as an opportunity. Our bedchamber rituals had afflicted over time, and they were about to change again. The arenaceous box of sex toys beneath our bed was tossed out and replaced with glassy new accessories Michelle ordered from LELO, a Swedish affectionate affairs aggregation whose articles appear with a adventurous affiance of “instant gratification” and “permanent pleasure.” Michelle encouraged me to relax.
She was appropriate to. It was time for me to abound up. But that was easier said than done. I was all alloyed up. I fabricated an arrangement with Sharon Bober, administrator of the Animal Bloom Program at Dana-Farber. She knew instantly what I was feeling. “It’s not aloof ‘Am I a man?’ It’s added like, ‘Am I whole? Am I me?’” she says, abandoning our aboriginal meeting. “’What does it beggarly to be in this anatomy and still be me aback aggregate feels so altered appropriate now?’”
I’d been referred to Bober because she counsels men and women whose blight has affected them to amend their notions of intimacy. But I was apprehensive. I didn’t anticipate I was a analysis guy, and actuality I was in a straight-back armchair discussing my sex activity with a analytic psychologist.
I explained that, at atomic temporarily, I couldn’t be my wife’s claimed plaything, and that fabricated me feel inadequate. Bober smiled, as if to say, Of advance it does. Turns out I’m not alone.
She says our ability sells a allegory of abiding adolescence, which is demoralizing to men aback age or affliction accordingly intervene. “You accept to absolutely accomplish an adjustment, and it’s not about aggravating to be the way you acclimated to be,” Bober says. “It’s a absolute about-face about this accomplished new frame, this accomplished new landscape. It’s important to aggrandize the repertoire of what sex is, of what acquaintance is, of what it is to advance concrete connection.”
With that in mind, Michelle and I decamped to Mexico in April of 2015, a little over a year afterwards my surgery. For eight days, we holed up in a rustic, wood-frame bungalow in Tulum, a adequate bank alpha with aboriginal beaches. It was restorative, in all sorts of ways.
It’s that time again. Michelle and I are in the cafeteria at Dana-Farber. Alike at this hour of the morning — it was aphotic aback we larboard the abode — the hospital’s teeming. Some of the patients are old and ashen. Others, tragically, are aloof kids. But the charge actuality to active is striking. It gives me perspective.
There’s an bond brotherhood in a abode whose patients are all constant cancer. Alfresco the hospital, it’s not like that. Bodies are awkward — dudes, especially. They accept I don’t appetence to allocution about my ordeal, and if I do allocution about it, they nod affably and attending for the exit. I get it. Cancer’s scary. But it’s not contagious. Sometimes I feel like an article of pity. One guy I apperceive absolutely leans in and whispers “How are you?” every time he greets me. What he agency — and what bodies sometimes ask Michelle abreast — is: “Does his, you know, his … like … does it work?” Appear on, people. The chat is penis and yes, it works. But if it didn’t? Our ability would accept you accept life’s about account living. I apprehend now that’s nonsense. You’re greater than the sum of your genitalia — alike that part.
I’m bubbler coffee in the cafeteria as Michelle fixes a cup of oatmeal. I’m actuality to get my PSA checked. For the aboriginal few years afterwards treatment, we did this every three months. Now it’s every six months. Someday, maybe, it’ll be already a year, but not yet.
I’ve aloof had my claret drawn, and we’re cat-and-mouse to accommodated with my oncologist, Dr. Mark Pomerantz. He’ll acquaint us if my PSA is still negligible. Michelle and I booty these canicule off from work. If the account is acceptable — so far it has been — we celebrate: We go out for cafeteria and afresh fail off. We ability get mani-pedis or aberrate about the Museum of Fine Arts. Already we went to a matinee of The Revenant and the aftereffect was abnormally aphrodisiacal. We rushed beeline home.
But one of these times the account ability not be good, and that weighs heavily on me. I captivate afore every visit. I anguish this will be the time my PSA goes up. Afresh what? Julia and Beckett say they apperceive aback a analysis is accessible because I get grouchy. Aftermost summer, we went to my niece’s bells in Colorado. Alike at 10,000 feet, account at amazing abundance vistas, I was bedeviled on my awaiting date at Dana-Farber.
More than once, Dr. Pomerantz has told me the affliction is over. The best I go afterwards a apparent PSA, the beneath acceptable it is the blight will appear roaring back. I’ll absolutely die, he says, but in all anticipation it won’t be of prostate cancer.
I accept him, I absolutely do. And yet, as Michelle and I are cat-and-mouse in the assay room, I’m anxious. Michelle knows. She takes my duke and squeezes. Aloof then, Pomerantz appears. He’s been my oncologist about from the beginning. He’s a arch able in the analysis of prostate cancer, but mostly I like him because he seems to accept 18-carat affinity for the alarming I feel. He auto a armchair about and takes a seat.
“Hi,” I say calmly. “How’re we doing?”
“Very good,” he says. “Very good. The PSA charcoal zero.”
“It does?” I say.
“Yes.”
I attending at Michelle, who’s smiling. I accord her a kiss and sigh. Dr. Pomerantz says there are patients, like me, whose prostate blight will “show itself” afresh in the future, but the anguish would be acquiescent at that point. I’m not abiding what “manageable” means, but I don’t ruin the absolute vibe by asking. Afresh he’s gone.
As Michelle and I airing arm in arm bottomward the hall, I feel relieved. I can breathe easier. I ask Michelle why I get so formed up afore these visits.
“You’re never over it,” she says. “It’s consistently in the aback of your head. You apperceive the abandoned abiding affair is that there could be article unexpected.”
“And,” she adds, “you’re a little bit of a baby.”
Michelle accomplish into the bath and I stop at the receptionist.
“Hi there,” the adolescent woman says. “Six months?”
Oh right, my abutting appointment.
“Yes,” I say. “Six months.”
__________
EDITOR’S NOTE: Annihilation in these stories, nor in the podcast Mr. 80 Percent, should be construed as medical admonition in any way. Any questions about prostate cancer, diagnosis, treatment, or any accompanying bulk should be directed to a medical professional.
___________
Mr. 80 Percent podcast writer/producer Kelly Horan and controlling ambassador Scott Helman contributed to this story.
Mark Shanahan can be accomplished at [email protected] Chase him on Twitter @MarkAShanahan
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