As per my last post, June 20, I stated I would return from my "hiatus" on July 18, with a rousing week of posts. Here it is August 2, and obviously that has not happened. In a three-part series to be posted over the next few days, I explain why life can sometimes change our ironclad plans. Enjoy . . . or . . . learn.
It Only Hurts When I Pee Hee Hee
or How to Kill an Entire Summer—Part I
No, I do NOT have an STD, but ha! I hope my title got your attention. This post is about something perhaps just as menacing: cancer.
I wasn’t sure I was ready to blog about my bout with this disease. Most of my posts share quotes from others more eloquent than I, “A Writer’s Wit,” or ascribe my take on literature, “My Book World.” But if I don’t write about my cancer, it might otherwise wind up as something-swept-under-the-carpet—mentally, emotionally—something I wish to avoid. Must I share? you might wonder. Yes.
The turmoil began when I noted blood in my urine. Knowing better than to fool around with a symptom as obvious as that (never a good one), I immediately made a quick appointment with my urologist, whom I’ve consulted for over twenty years.
My appointment with Doctor V began at 9:30 a.m. on June 13, two days after my seventy-fifth birthday. I mean, I had to stop and think. Edith Wharton lived to be seventy-five. Penny Marshall lived to be seventy-five. So too, her once-upon-a-co-star, Cindy Williams. I’ve had a great life, I say, trying to bolster myself. Anyway, the doctors and his staff did at least eight things to me while I was present for my two-hour-and-forty-minute appointment.
1) They took an EKG.
2) They took and tested my urine.
3) Took and examined my blood sample.
4) & 5) Gave me an antibiotic shot in EACH buttocks.
6) & 7) The office was a sprawling building. My doctor and a second urologist maintain their own radiology lab, employ their own radiologist, who x-rayed my kidneys. (I think this is right. Things moved so quickly.) The rugged man with a gray beard but the hardbody of one who works out at Golds told me mechanically (because he must repeat the same words thousands of times a day) to lay on the table. It was a high, narrow sort of table, with a footstool to help me up. And above me loomed that X-ray machine, threatening to create solarized pictures of my organs. The radiologist entered the adjacent room, his office, to execute the x-rays (Hold your breath please|click|you may breathe).
When done, he determined all the images were viable. The radiologist disappeared into his office again. He emerged and informed me both kidneys and prostate were healthy. Yay.
This same man then slathered cold gel over parts of my body, injected it up my rear end, and stuck a probe up there to take sonograms of my kidneys, my prostate? (Again, I know he told me, but I couldn’t seem to retain the information.) I just wanted the barrage against my body to be over. When finished, he handed me the large, gel-soaked piece of paper I’d been laying on, and pointed also to the cute stand with rolls of toilet tissue.
“There’s more paper over there,” he said, “if you should need it to wipe off the gel. Put all that paper stuff over there in that big red container, not in the trash can, and I’ll leave you to get dressed.”
NEXT TIME: In “It Only Hurts When I Pee, Part II,” I share the gruesome details of another test, the one that reveals I have a bladder tumor.