On “getting” prostate cancer

Now in writing that first line, I tinkered with various alternatives to “getting.” None seemed to fit. One doesn’t earn a disease; it’s certainly not something I ever saw as compensatory for a lifelong affiliation with good health. I didn’t obtain it either. It’s not as if I chalked up loyalty points like an airline card and was rewarded with prostate cancer.

I also didn’t acquire it, inherit it, procure it, or snag it.

I was neither smitten nor afflicted. The former makes me sound dead and the latter sounds sickly, which I wasn’t, unless you count the stomach rumblings from appalling hospital food.

My prostate cancer merely got me one day, discovered after biopsy three. It might have got me at biopsy one or two except the doctor’s aim was off-target and the needles missed their mark. Not that I can blame him. The tumor was just one millimeter in diameter and contained to the gland. Easy to miss, although my urologist felt enough of a ridge to call for the biopsy in the first place.

In the four months between diagnosis and the decision to undergo surgery, a radical prostatectomy, there was little about prostate cancer I didn’t learn. Once I opted for surgery, I took umbrage with its rather offensive name. Radical.

Of course it was radical. I was placing my nether regions in the hands of complete strangers and allowing them to tinker with thread thin nerves. Indeed, removing a cancerous prostate is radical. It’s also tricky, delicate, dangerous, and risky. But I don’t suppose an official name like Risky Prostatectomy would do much for the onco-urologists union.

From surgery I went to a catheter; from catheter to feminine pads to absorb post-op drips; from post-op drips to dark pants for a trip to Europe; from Lyon and Turin to home and trying to regain some semblance of conditioning lost over four months of non-activity. Now, two and half years later, with every PSA test indicating no sign of anything, I contend with just regaining full function of the nerves that control, well, you know, that guy thing related to his member.

So I wrote about it all. This was a strange thing to do and not heroic either. I wrote for me and because I hoped my style, approach and story might appeal to fellow prostate cancer survivors.

It began with monthly articles in the Prostate Cancer Association Ottawa newsletter The Walnut. The first one was entitled Assume the position, for the obvious reason men of a certain age are familiar with. As the months wore on, PCAO members were telling me they rather liked the articles. There hadn’t quite been such an approach before, which I knew. During my own edification on the subject, I’d found countless medical books, articles, journals and videos. Most were interesting, some thick with jargon, and each played a role in making me more cancer-astute. None though seemed too personal, let alone light. They were rather morbid, come to think of it.

Months later, my brother in Toronto congratulated me on writing, he said, some of the best stuff I’d done. I wanted to take it as a compliment, though with our regular mutual ribbing, I couldn’t be sure. He also suggested there might be a book in it.

The book takes shape

In the summer of 2007, I set out to expand the articles and add chapters that chronicled my journey from early diagnosis, when I first assumed the position, to the current. I approached the PCAO with the idea of a book, asking if they’d consider underwriting its publication. With barely a hint of objection, and after my setting out a detailed marketing and publishing agenda, the group agreed to go ahead with the project.

On April 17, 2008, Assume the position: One guy’s journey through prostate cancer came off the press.

The next night, at the PCAO’s regular monthly meeting, I read an excerpt. We sold over 30 copies that first night and sales across Canada and into the U.S. have not abated since. The book was given a resoundingly positive review by health columnist André Picard in the Globe and Mail.

There were subsequent stories about it in Ottawa papers as well as numerous radio and TV interviews.

The response to the book’s tone and message has been uniformly positive. One interviewer referred to it as being a funny book. It isn’t. It has its droll,perhaps witty, moments, but I can’t imagine setting out to write an intentionally funny book about prostate cancer. There’s not much funny about it.

I’m quite at ease to joke about my own experiences. Perhaps that bent for a light-hearted, self-deprecating message has resounded with readers.

Cancer survivors have come to call ourselves that because each of us has undergone a highly personal, intimate journey with varying degrees of pain, suffering, and sometimes humiliation. For me, that humiliation was in different forms: being helped into a shower the day after surgery by a male attendant, with my penis attached to a catheter, or trying the first time to select the right size female absorbent pad.

We survive these experiences because, essentially, we are a resilient lot. Heroism of a different sort, I suppose.

I’ve been asked what my message is in Assume the position. I honestly don’t know. Readers have written to me with a myriad of things they gleaned from the book. One woman said her teenage son read it and wants to do a high school project on prostate cancer. Another lady gave it to a friend who was about to have the same surgery so that he’d cope with it better. One gentleman had already undergone treatment for some time and claimed he just needed an emotional lift.

Men need to come to grips with some realities of our impending middle and older years. I still haven’t for most things, except for understanding a disease that will afflict about 1 in 7 Canadian men each year.

Without ever knowing why or how, they, too will just get prostate cancer. We ought to do something about it, right?