Thursday, October 05, 2006
I must apologize for letting so much time pass between posts -- I do wonder if I've lost my audience! I do think about a lot of things I'd like to write down, but the school year is never busier than it is in the first six weeks. Once we're past the midterms, my schedule should permit me to write a little more.
As far as news goes, I am scheduled for surgery on Monday, November 13, at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore. My surgeon is Christian Pavlovich, an expert in laparoscopic surgery on the prostate. I went down to Baltimore to meet him and get a feel for what type of fellow he is -- I feel I am in good hands, come what may. I should be in the hospital for two nights, and then recuperating for about a week with a catheter.
I must confess that problems with my urinary tract have always been a bit of a phobia of mine. My father-in-law and sister-in-law are prone to bladder stones, and I have always gotten quite sqeamish whenever anyone in my wife's family discusses those problems -- I do hide my discomfort; one should always show concern and sympathy before anything else, especially when someone is recounting a very painul experience. But my phobia about this goes back much farther, I'm sure; I remember as a child feeling faint when one of my baby sitters was discussing having blood in her urine. If you've seen the movie "Reds," you might recall the scene when John Reed pees blood at the work camp; I cannot watch that scene. I shudder at a certain line in the Monty Python song "Brave Sir Robin." Of all the things I'll be dealing with over the next several years, the thought of the catheter is the one I hate the most. I am a wimp about these things.
I have a bone scan and a pelvic CT scan scheduled on October 10, pretty routine for prostate cancer. The CT scan is done to detect whether any cancer cells have gotten outside the prostate capsule and lodged in any nearby tissues, while the bone scan will look for distant sites. If they find enough bone sites, we will likely cancel the surgery and concentrate on therapies that arrest the cancer rather than remove it. The thinking is that if that's my situation, the primary tumor is probably no longer the major source of new cancer cells, so there'd be little point in removing it. But, that's getting a little ahead of ourselves. We'll jump off that bridge when we get to it.
One of the things that I've found over the last several weeks is that I really do not like telling people about my cancer, and I think I don't do a very good job of it. After I learned about it, I decided that I would tell people who I thought needed to know, and I'd tell people who asked, but that I wouldn't go much beyond that (although I really should send an e-mail out to my distant friends). The trouble with that strategy is that I often find the someone who needs to know when they ask me to do something I would normally do, and I have to tell them that I can't and why I can't. So, on top of them feeling sympathy for me, they also feel guilty for having asked. I'll probably write Dear Abby about this -- I don't have any insight into how to proceed.
As far as news goes, I am scheduled for surgery on Monday, November 13, at Johns Hopkins Medical Center in Baltimore. My surgeon is Christian Pavlovich, an expert in laparoscopic surgery on the prostate. I went down to Baltimore to meet him and get a feel for what type of fellow he is -- I feel I am in good hands, come what may. I should be in the hospital for two nights, and then recuperating for about a week with a catheter.
I must confess that problems with my urinary tract have always been a bit of a phobia of mine. My father-in-law and sister-in-law are prone to bladder stones, and I have always gotten quite sqeamish whenever anyone in my wife's family discusses those problems -- I do hide my discomfort; one should always show concern and sympathy before anything else, especially when someone is recounting a very painul experience. But my phobia about this goes back much farther, I'm sure; I remember as a child feeling faint when one of my baby sitters was discussing having blood in her urine. If you've seen the movie "Reds," you might recall the scene when John Reed pees blood at the work camp; I cannot watch that scene. I shudder at a certain line in the Monty Python song "Brave Sir Robin." Of all the things I'll be dealing with over the next several years, the thought of the catheter is the one I hate the most. I am a wimp about these things.
I have a bone scan and a pelvic CT scan scheduled on October 10, pretty routine for prostate cancer. The CT scan is done to detect whether any cancer cells have gotten outside the prostate capsule and lodged in any nearby tissues, while the bone scan will look for distant sites. If they find enough bone sites, we will likely cancel the surgery and concentrate on therapies that arrest the cancer rather than remove it. The thinking is that if that's my situation, the primary tumor is probably no longer the major source of new cancer cells, so there'd be little point in removing it. But, that's getting a little ahead of ourselves. We'll jump off that bridge when we get to it.
One of the things that I've found over the last several weeks is that I really do not like telling people about my cancer, and I think I don't do a very good job of it. After I learned about it, I decided that I would tell people who I thought needed to know, and I'd tell people who asked, but that I wouldn't go much beyond that (although I really should send an e-mail out to my distant friends). The trouble with that strategy is that I often find the someone who needs to know when they ask me to do something I would normally do, and I have to tell them that I can't and why I can't. So, on top of them feeling sympathy for me, they also feel guilty for having asked. I'll probably write Dear Abby about this -- I don't have any insight into how to proceed.
