Cough

Leaving my office early today I took a cab to a small tastefully nondescript professional building. Nestled among other tastefully designed and well kempt buildings on a curving suburban drive with a small (statutorily defined to be so) sign that said Urology Associates is my destination. December again, eh, it must be time to go see the dick doc. This is pretty much two years to the month since I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Time is speeding by and 21 months have passed since the surgery to remove the malignancy. Time and caution dictate that the appointed moment for a checkup is here.

No matter how you try and deny it, once you are branded with the big “C” diagnosis you life is changed. You may wrap the devil word cancer up in clinical terminology, things like stages and grading of cells but it doesn’t alter the diagnosis. You may shove your awareness into a mental box bearing the label, “Prostate Cancer Takes a Long Time to do its Damage”, but you still live with the fact that you have/have had/may still have cancer.

Cancer is pretty much in your face when you have it. Addressing it involves calm and persistence in seeking out information and making decisions. You need to be this way when every part of your being is screaming “I don’t want this to be happening”. Twisting insides your guts are saying “Run Away, Run Away” but there is no place to run. Then there is the mental check list like making that occurs like, I lived next to the world’s largest chemical plant. My aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, father, friend’s father all worked in that cauldron of chemical suffixes and prefixes soaking those chemicals into their cellular goo for decades before I was I was even born. My aunts, uncles, etc., all came down with cancer and fought it, some living and some dying. Genetics and location, location, location that is why I got cancer that and maybe the two packs of cigarettes a day I smoked during my early twenties.

Upon admittance to the tastefully decorated but calmingly subdued office I hand over my insurance cards, accept my plastic cup and head into the bathroom to provide what I hope with be an acceptable but unremarkable sample. Completing that action I go out and note the sign that says my doctor is behind schedule by a half an hour and I match that up with the fact I am twenty minutes early. Then I sit down to read the informative literature left by the drug representatives and equipment manufacturers. Did you know there was a penile SST syndrome? I didn’t. It looks exactly like what it sounds like.

Waiting sucks. Waiting for the doctor on follow up day sucks even more. Waiting is just playing a game of dodge ball with the unknown hangman. You don’t do the blood work for these visits until you are there for the encounter. As a result you will not know what is going on in your blood for several days afterwards. In that my draw was at five p.m. on Tuesday and the local lab turnaround on PSA tests is three days I most likely will not know until Monday what my status is. While the doctor may smile and make nice talking about favorite ethnic foods, the constituent parts of my blood won’t pull or seal the trap door on the floor of the gallows until next Monday.

Quite possibly I am in this mood because of the weather. Dark gray and white clouds race across the sky. Now what is coming down is a cold rain. Last night it was sleet, snow and ice pellets. By midnight tonight it will be snow again with two more inches on the ground by morning. Gloomy skies and chilled bones make a trip to this tasteful doctors’ office suite just that much more ominous. It may be always sunny in other cities, but it is never sunny here.

Reading back on this it sounds as if I am depressed, I’m not. So far I have been cancer free and that makes me happy. My hope is that come Monday I will still be cancer free. It is just that the journey on this afternoon on this day reflects back with gray overtones. This is just a part of my life, it is not my life.