SAMEER SHARMA

I read on the internet that Major League Baseball just signed their first two players from India. Imagine that, and after a hundred years or more! Because my urologist/surgeon is of Indian descent, of course I took notice.

What sold me in the first place, was that he’d said both his parents were surgeons, and coupled with his love of video games from an early age, the da Vinci robotic-assisted approach to radical prostatectomies seemed a natural melding of two worlds. I couldn’t disagree, though I found myself more focused on his lineage.

My urologist/surgeon sure knows his stuff. He’d laid out a number of options ranging from something called watchful waiting (I liked the alliteration), to radiation therapy, conventional surgery and robotic-assisted laparoscopy, each with a number of distinctive variations that had been assigned clever names like Cyberknife, brachytherapy, cryotherapy, and the proton and shaped beam radio surgeries, and each with their respective risks and potential life-altering side effects. I was told chemotherapy is typically reserved for the more advanced stages of the disease.

From early on, I guess you could say we were smitten – my wife admittedly more than I, but then I was still reeling from an onset of mild dementia brought on by the burden of my prostate’s betrayal. My urologist/surgeon carries himself with a certain swagger, seems confident in his abilities almost to the point of being brazen. He said if I were a family member he’d recommend watchful waiting. I’m more curious about his lifetime batting average, or whether or not he expects to win the Cy Young award.