After my diagnosis of prostate cancer and the biopsy, which showed a Gleason Score of nine--highly aggressive--the urologist was infectiously positive. He slapped me on the back and exclaimed, "You're going to do just great! These days, men don't die of prostate cancer, they die with prostate cancer." All it would take was a course of radiation over nine weeks, five days a week. So now it was upon me.
For two months half a year ago, urinating was urgent, painful, or impossible. As the 200-hour yoga training was coming to an end, my PSA was 18. The urologist told me that my prostate was "hard" and "irregular." How I loved those special moments with the doctor, after which I used tissues to get the lube off me. The catheter became a way of life on and off for over two months. On, when I couldn't pee; off, when the doctor wanted to see how the Flowmax was working. It didn't work. I writhed awake several nights in excruciating pain as my bladder went into spasm. In the morning I begged the urologist to put the catheter back in. Of course, the tube in my penis and creepy bag hanging on my leg made the yoga all the more enjoyable. At the teacher training graduation in March, the bag, my new friend, pushed against my bluejeans like a ferret that crawled up my leg. I felt like a hundred years old and looked it in the group photograph. I had this frozen, shocked look that was out of step with the young radiant yogis around me. The rose petals sprinkled all over the floor looked like blood. I must be a sad sack, because the sweetness of the occasion was lost on me. Why couldn't I do great like the doctor assured me?
The TURP, Trans-Urethral Resection of the Prostate, was successful. As the anesthesia was making me sleepy, the urologist came by and told me again that I was "going to do great," and it reminded me of "Make America Great Again." Well, voila. I was able to pee again. When you tell them you can pee again, they always ask you how the "flow" is, and I had to say "whoopee!" Still, I never quite got over the image of getting "reamed out," as a description of the procedure. There was a lot of reaming going on in that hospital, especially when the invoices started to arrive and my insurance deductible was doing some laughing at me. I was doing great.
Dr. San Sim, the radiation oncologist at Monmouth Medical Center in Long Branch, was a calm and reassuring presence. He agreed with the urologist that surgery was not an option, because the aggressiveness of the cancer would not permit them to get all of it, and I would have to have radiation anyway. I was lucky, he said, because the CAT scan showed that the cancer had not spread outside the prostate, for example, the lymph nodes and the bones. The prostate surgeon Robert Weiss, of Robert Wood Johnson in New Brunswick, concurred. So radiation it would be.
After two treatments, where they strap you to the board with a body mold and line it up to the four tattoo marks I now have, I'm not quite philosophical. The most I could do to get though it was yogic breathing. Concentrate on the dristhi at the bridge of my nose; pay attention to the edge of my nostrils as the cool air comes in and the warm air goes out; inhale one two three four; exhale one two three four. It offered some consolation.
Lucid self-disclosure,tempered by measured description of the environment and context. Well depicted!
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