Desire

My friend Steve Altman, in a recent blog post, wrote about the effect of Univision on his father, who was in his mid-eighties and gradually losing his interest in life.  Unable to feed or dress himself, no longer able to read, he spent much of his time half asleep, seated in front of the television set in his assisted living facility’s common room. 

Univision, the most popular Spanish-language network in the country, employs on its programs scantily dressed, gorgeous young women, who move beautifully and are a pleasure to the eye.  When his son, surfing the channels in the search of a program to interest his father, came upon Univision, his father brightened up.  Thereafter on his visits, Steve would turn to that channel, which would cause his father to “sit up in his chair.  He’d lift his chin.  A glimmer would come back into his eyes, he’d smile just a little bit, and sometimes—you had to see this to believe it—he’d start to sing…. Virtually nothing that that had interested him throughout his life interested him anymore.  But over his last year or so on earth, one thing still did.  And it was, truth to tell, the last thing to go.”   A few days after he no longer responded to those beautiful girls, the old man died. Generalizing from his father’s experience, Steve suggests that a man’s interest in sex is hard-wired and irrepressible.  He titled his post “The Last Thing to Go”  [http://www.317am.net/2011/11/the-last-thing-to-go.html#more-11531]. 

It may be the last thing to go but not if you’re undergoing hormone treatment for the suppression of testosterone, the male hormone that acts like a fertilizer for prostate cancer cells.  Testosterone suppression effectively castrates you, not with a knife but with chemicals.  Take it from me.  I’ve undergone it twice, once in 2007, for about five months, after which I thought I’d never have to repeat it,  and again this year, when became clear that it will be a permanent part of my therapy until it no longer works and other measures will have to be tried. Now I know why eunuchs guarded harems.  

The effect of the hormone treatment has been dramatic.  I can walk without pain and the PSA index, which measures the amount of prostate cells in the blood, an index that had been doubling each month, has dropped to almost zero.  If chemical castration is the price for a longer pain-free life, it’s a price I’m willing to pay.  Still, I’ve had to sell myself a bill of goods, as my father used to say, to convince myself that masculinity has many components besides sexual desire, which is, after all, found in women as well as in men, that my masculinity remains unimpaired, and that I’m the same person now that I was before the treatment. 

For me, desire is not the last thing to go.  It’s already gone. But the life force, of which  sexual desire is a product, remains strong in me.  I embrace each day with gratitude for being alive, determined to wring as much experience from it as I can.  And that includes watching the girls on Univision.

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