On the front page of the Daily Mail on Saturday, a teaser line for an article inside. “After his diagnosis, my husband became a cancer bore, so I left him” . What a wonderful publication the Mail is, always reflecting the best of humanity in its mission to help us all become less selfish, wiser, kinder, more open minded.
At the risk of being boring, I recently had to attend an MRI scan – half an hour in a noisy scanner that was a bit like being in a rather dull Steve Reich concert – “dig that crazy rhythm”, as the King might say – then an undignified half an hour having a prostate biopsy – not the most enjoyable thing you can do in Hampstead, even on a Tuesday lunchtime – I’ve been given a diagnosis of low to intermediate risk prostate cancer.
Prostate cancer is one of the generically less aggressive sorts, and its been caught fairly early, so treatment can resolve it relatively straightforwardly. So, its just as well that I decided to stop treating the imperative to get up several times in the night to go wee as just one of the Oil of Uley’s seven signs of ageing, and mention it at my annual check up. Anyone reading this with similar symptoms should get them checked out.
I’ve got to have a further total body MRI can next week, to rule out the possibility that its spread anywhere else. So, fingers crossed for that one. This involves being injected with a radioactive substance which will light up anything cancerous – so I’m hoping the result won’t look like a Christmas Tree. The notes for this say that this is quite safe AND that for six hours afterwards I should avoid being within a metre of small children and pregnant women. Bit of a mixed message there, but means I will have to be extra alert on the tube.
After that, there’s a discussion on treatment. One of which is to chop the prostate out – the short sharp shock approach – the other is a mix of hormone treatment and Radiotherapy (which is about radiation, not listening to a lot of soothing music). The hormone treatment suppresses testosterone – which I don’t think I have a lot of left these days – but J assures me that that will probably be good for my complexion, so its an ill wind…
The radiotherapy zaps the cancer with localised radiation – a sort of selective death ray requiring a daily weekday appointment for two to seven weeks. The notes attached reassure that this means I won’t get radioactive genitalia – which is a shame really. With glow in the dark gonads there’d be no need to switch the light on during nocturnal loo visits.
Hey ho. More to follow as things develop because, as Nora Ephron so rightly said “everything is copy” and, beyond a certain point of original creativity, everything is copied.
