I have cancer, prostate cancer.
When the doctor told me, he said that if you’re going to get it, this is the one to get. It made feel as if I’d just gotten an upgrade on Cancer Air. It was caught very early, found in only 5 percent of one of 12 samples gathered by shooting a harpoon gun into me (where, you don’t want to know). So I am lucky.
I’m reminded of a brainstorming session I went to with Tony Hendra, the comedy writer, toward the end of the ’80s, when he was leading the collaborative writing of a book called The ’90s: A Look Back. I was invited to a session where we speculated about the near future of medicine and Tony riffed about what it would be like once they found a pill to care cancer. “Got a spot of cancer today?” he said, copyrighting. “No problem. Take Tumorout. You’ll feel as good as new. Go ahead. Light up that cigarette. Won’t hurt a bit.” I was disappointed that his cancer gag didn’t make it into the book. I’m also disappointed that they didn’t invent Tumorout.
Why am I even telling you about this? As I wrote in What Would Google Do?, I gained tremendous benefit sharing another ailment – heart arrhythmia – here on my blog. And so I have no doubt that by sharing this, I will get useful advice and warm support (and maybe a few weeks’ respite from trolls). I argue for the benefits of the public life. So I’d better live it.
I also hope to be one more guy to convince you men to get get your PSA checked: a small mitzvah in return for my luck. And when we talk about the cost of screening in the health-care debate, I’ll stand up to say that when you’re the 1-in-100, screening is worth it.
I’ve always been a cancerphobe; can’t imagine much worse than that creeping invasion. Yet I’ve surprised myself, staying calm in the face of realizing my fears, probably because I know it could be worse and, well, it is what it is. I’ve been using this amazing internet to do research and, with my wife’s help and counsel, make the complicated decision on a course of treatment.
Before doing my research, I’d assumed that the treatment Rudy Giuliani made famous – radioactive seeds – would be the way to go: simple, and if it doesn’t work, I thought, then I could resort to surgery. But it turns out that once you get zapped, it becomes very tricky to perform surgery. At my age – young, damnit – the wiser course is surgery, cutting out the prostate and, one hopes, all the disease with it.
I’m opting for robotic surgery – geek that I am, how could I not? My only fear is that they’ll wheel me into the O.R. and I’ll see that the machine is powered by Dell.
I’ve also chosen Sloan Kettering and Dr. Raul Parra to do the surgery. There’s one of the privileges of living in New York, among the best.
I’ll keep you informed as I find notes of interest while progressing toward surgery in mid-September and through recovery. Fear not, I’m not going to turn this into a disease journal: I don’t expect you to be consumed with my problems when others have theirs, far worse. Or perhaps you should fear, for instead, I will keep on writing about media wonkishness: about the rise of the next media and the fall of the last. Except now, I’ll be in a worse mood.
