Cancer Free in 12 Hours
Cancer free 12 hours from now! That’s the plan, at least. Like so many serious illnesses, prostate cancer is spoken about in whispers, but from all I’ve read recently, perhaps more lives could be saved if we just talked more openly, thereby increasing awareness, prevention, and earlier diagnosis.
A friend came up to me as if to share a secret. “Betty told me about your … ‘procedure’,” she said, and before she could offer her sympathy and support, I corrected her: “It’s called prostate cancer. Just say it.” (The funny thing is, she is a nurse.)
Yep. I have prostate cancer. I say it. And I also say I’m one of the lucky ones. There are two types of lucky ones. Some get it so late in life that they can practically ignore it, confident they will die with it but not of it. The other lucky ones are in my category; young enough that I can’t ignore it, I’m otherwise pretty healthy and we caught it early. It appears to be localized to the prostate and, if so, when Dr. Frazier finishes his highly skilled work starting at 10:00 AM tomorrow, I will never have to worry about prostate cancer again.
Well, I will worry about it, actually, but it won’t be my prostate cancer I’ll worry about. I will worry about loved ones who are male, or who are in love with a male. Any men over 40 should do themselves and their loved ones a big favor, and begin regular screening for it. Get that baseline PSA set. If it rises too fast, your doctor will send you to a urologist. If, as in my case, there is a history of it in your family, you will almost surely get a biopsy. Getting cancer is not the bad part. The bad part is getting it and not finding out until it is too late to choose what would have been the best option, which is to get it out.
I expect I’ll be off line for a while, taking a nap grateful that my doctors and their teams chose medical careers. 
December 31st, 2010 at 7:15 pm
As 2010 comes to a close, I’ll add the postscript: Dr. Frasier and his team did a terrific job. I am recovering from the surgery faster than I had expected. Most importantly, my pathologist reports that every indication is that all of the prostate cancer that was in my body is now harmlessly sliced, labeled and analyzed in his lab.