My First Cancer

The diagnosis that transformed my life came five years ago today.

I was vacationing, driving east on I-10, toward Tucson, when my cell phone broke the monotony of interstate pavement. It was the urologist who had done my prostate biopsy; we had played phone tag for several days, the apparent lack of urgency giving me a confident calm. I took an exit ramp, pulled to a stop and, old newspaper reporter that I am, began taking notes.

“There’s a little bit of cancer,” he said. What?! He gave me the title of a book to read so I could ask intelligent questions about my first cancer, as well as understand his answers. No sense discussing my Gleason Score unless I knew what it measures and what it means. “Read the book, and we’ll talk Friday.”

At a Barnes & Noble in Tucson, I searched the next morning for the book but finally had to ask for help: “Do you have Dr. Patrick Walsh’s Guide to Surviving –”

The rest of the title, Prostate Cancer, never came out. I had choked, both vocally and mentally. For it was only upon uttering Surviving that I fully grasped what I had been handed: a disease with the potential to kill me.

Five years following diagnosis is a milestone in cancer survival, and while it is a good deal for me personally, it is also a Big Deal: Virtually all of us who were diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2007 have so far survived the disease, thanks to earlier diagnosis and better treatments. So much so that there’s a kerfuffle today over whether prostate cancer is over-diagnosed and over-treated. In other words, many men (most?) will die with the disease, not from it. There’s just no way yet of telling early on who needs treatment and who doesn’t.

And me? I remain grateful that I was diagnosed. Diagnosis and surgery led to the discovery that my prostate cancer had taken up residence in nearby lymph nodes, warranting more aggressive treatment and more frequent check-ups. I’ve now had an experimental drug, surgery, hormone therapy and radiation accompanied by more hormone therapy. Over-treated? Not me.

I take whatever they have to offer, whatever will help me at each turn of the cancer screw — that’s Bill Curry’s guide to surviving prostate cancer.

Here’s to the next five.