Silver Linings

Doctors have different strategies for delivering bad news.  In the spring of 2007, my urologist at St. Lukes Roosevelt Hospital  perched himself on the window sill of my hospital room and said “I think we need to have a little talk.”  This was his introduction to telling me that I had prostate cancer. 

In 2011, my regular doctor ordered a bone scan because my hip hurt.  When I entered his office to hear the results, he said “I’m so sorry.  Your cancer has spread to the bone.”

Last week my urologist, at Memorial Sloan Kettering, after performing an unusually painful cystoscopy, said “how would you like to wear a catheter for awhile?”  He went on to explain that he found growths not in my urethra, as I expected he would, growths which he would excise as he had done several times before, but in the penis.  These were inoperable.  “So what’s the story?” I asked him.  “It looks as if you’ll need to be attached to a tube and a bag from now on,” he said.  This would either be a conventional catheter or a device that entered the bladder directly. It was clear that it was painful for him to tell me this.  It wouldn’t be “awhile” that I’d be wearing a catheter or its equivalent, unless this was his way of telling me that my life expectancy is exceedingly short, but as long as I live.  The “awhile,” I guess, was his way to break the news gradually.

Well, it’s not so bad.  I won’t be wearing a colostomy bag, which collects feces, and to my mind is even worse.  And I won’t have to swallow a pill with a tiny camera, as a dear friend of mine must do this week, in order to find the source of unexplained bleeding.  And there’s a silver lining to my cloud.  I’ll never again have to get up in the middle of the night to urinate.  Lately I’d been getting up every hour or half hour, disturbing my wife in the procress.  She's sleeping better now and as for me, I’m at last sleeping through the night, and I feel more rested than I have for years.  Now I can drink soup and dinner and not worry about it.  One more advantage:  I wear long elasticized socks to control the lymphedema in my legs and feet.  I need to check them constantly and pull them up if they’ve slipped down.  But now the straps that keep the urine bag affixed to one leg keep that sock up all day long.  It’s an ill wind that blows no one good.

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