Then came the day

My wife of over 30 years died of a rare virulent form of cancer in only a few weeks from her diagnosis. Throughout the 3 or 4 years before that she was diagnosed with a vast range of illnesses and we rarely spent a week without a hospital appointment. She was the sick one, I never thought it would be me. In the last couple of years of her life I experienced tremendous heat around my genitals, discomfort and an increasing urge to urinate little and often. We had too many hospital appointments for me to take it seriously. I did make it to the family doctor’s. No one seemed to suspect anything more serious than bad hygiene or a bladder infection. Finally, thankfully, one day, I got a doctor who ordered a blood test. I returned for the results a couple of weeks later. Your PSA is 18.6 she said, don’t panic. I wasn’t actually panicking at all, of course, until she said it.

The worst part was the biopsy. I’m not going to describe it, but it goes down in my life narrative as almost certainly the worst physical experience of my life. Then came the day which I had feared since I was about 10. In those days, the 1960s, cancer wasn’t even named. It was called “the big C” and spoken of in hushed, fearful tones. I think I had a prescient sense of what it would be like even then, sitting on the wrong side of the desk with the doctor looking over his glasses and saying you have cancer.

I chose radiotherapy which was a doddle for the first 2 or 3 weeks. The last 2 or 3 were another story as my bladder got increasingly unpredictable and as I clutched the steering wheel of my car on my way home crying and screaming in pain. The pain was intermittent and increasingly powerful. One time clutching a plastic chair outside a bar on the street, the woman I was with told me it looked like the pangs of childbirth.

After 6 weeks of radiotherapy and the beginning of hormone treatment my blood showed up a psa of .38. Six months on I am down to .22 – good news I think. May it carry on going down. I have two more hormone injections ahead of me and they seem to make me more fatigued than I can remember and possibly a little fluffy in the head, although it could be aging creeping upon me as well. I make up for it by going to bed early, waking up many times in the night to pee, but staying in bed so that out of 12 hours I might have 6 or 7 of sleep if I’m lucky. My consultant says I should get my energy back by the Christmas after next, let’s see.