STEPPIN' OUT WITH MY STRAPON

Walking hand in hand with the one I love, sun on my shoulders, the wind at my back... steppin' out with my strapon and feelin' free.

WHAT WAS THAT?

I wake up to bright lights, loud voices, and a sudden, frenzied commotion. I wake up, and right away I’m thinking: I’ve been in a plane crash and I’m still strapped into my seat!

Except there’s this catheter draining to somewhere below my line of sight.

Which might be a good idea for longer flights, especially as the baby boomers’ prostrates begin to balloon. But in this context, tangled in the switches and cabling, the catheter seems ridiculously out-of-place.

Except this isn’t a crash site, it’s a hospital bed – one of several in Recovery, each a deluxe model with all the gizmos and gadgetry. Like lawn equipment, they’ve come a long way since the Eisenhower years.

Still, I’m confused by the juxtaposition.

It’s as if they’d just rolled me onto the operating table, then I’ve been wheeled to my room and it's instantly dark outside and nearly my bedtime. Glad I thought to hydrate. Glad I packed my toothbrush and a pair of slipper socks.

WITH LITTLE ELSE LEFT DISTURBED

On Friday, we get robbed. They came into our home and took a gold bracelet I’d engraved and given to my wife on the occasion of our wedding in 1972, and an old Elgin pocket watch that had belonged to my great-grandfather. He’d been a professional photographer in the late 1800s, and had photographically developed images of my great-grandmother and infant grandfather onto the watch’s porcelain face.

The incursion: rather a precise assault, we’d each later agreed. Almost surgical, a surgical strike! We were heartbroken. On the upside, sure, collateral damage. But fittingly, except for intangibles, with little else left disturbed.

AS MANY AS A DOZEN OR TWENTY

This morning I heard about several high profile men who recently died of prostate cancer, as many as a dozen or twenty, and already I can’t remember their names.

OUR CATCHER'S MITT

So I get home from work, and there’s this FedEx package waiting. When I open it, I see it’s my old catcher’s mitt – from when I played Little League. I’d bought the mitt in 1959 with S&H Green Stamps. Oh, and this letter and a poem were tucked inside:

Dear Brother,

I’ve enclosed a gift that you sent to me many years ago. You didn’t know it at the time, and I have never told you.

I want you to fully understand how important you are to me and how much I love you. I only have one brother, and you be da man!

I’m not sure you realize how much I look up to you, how proud I am of you, and how fortunate I feel to be able to constantly learn from you. For years I tried to emulate your every move. Thankfully, I matured and became my own person. We share the same genes, and I can only hope that I have at least a fraction of your many attributes. We are different, yet similar in many ways.

I’m very worried about your wellbeing, and am angry that you have to go through this crap. I’m sorry it’s happened. But I feel strength knowing it’s you tackling this issue. You’re so strong both mentally and physically that I’m confident you’ll get through it with flying colors. It’ll be difficult, but you can handle it. Easy for me to say, I know.

You’ll be okay, and please know I’ll be right there with you. Be strong, just like you always have been.

Love,
John

ONE WEEK

Okay, the operation is one week out.

They moved it up. Radical prostatectomy. Everyone said I should be happy to get it over with, but I’d been living in the moment like they told me and suddenly the moment was cut short.

So I did the only thing I could. I grudgingly adjusted to the new schedule, and now the operation is one week out.

One week. Perhaps there’s a silver lining. I’ll be ready, I’ll simply need to rearrange a few things. Maybe channel my emotions. It helps that the weather’s turned ‘round. It’s not exactly the January thaw we’d been hoping for, but after spending two months in the single digits, forty’s the new sixty.

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.