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Gordon Burgett
Category:
Health/Wellness
Publisher: Communication Unlimited
ISBN-10: 0982663595
Type: Non-Fiction
Pages: 120
Copyright: July 20, 2013
ISBN-13: 9780982663592
Price: $4.95 (eBook)
Prostate cancer bearers need inspiration, help, and plenty of related laughs before, during, and after their treatment and adjustment. That's what this book is all about, from a recent survivor (with a computer)...
A humorous yet no-nonsense account of the near-year the author spent waiting for his prostate cancer to vaporize or take a hike.
Burgett's off-beat view of being a patient--worse yet, one who peed invisibly almost any place any time, until inertia, nature, his urologist, and some magic pills mercifully intervened--is directed at any male "chosen" to harshly host man's second most prevalent disease. It's also written for spouses, kids, parents, and arm-distance friends. That is, almost everybody.
Gordon had most of the usual treatments, told the usual lies, and slept next to the washroom (sometimes waking up in it) while he kept his publishing business alive, wrote books and blogs, terrorized his "please-don't-touch" buddies, and spoke gloveless to unsuspecting groups.
No tongue-twisting technical terms in Surviving Prostate Cancer either. Burgett is 75 and if he can walk across hot, malignant coals and still have cold feet, you can too. Here's the inside stuff...
Excerpt
Chapter One
Buck up! It takes a man to beat prostate cancer. What follows is true, and sometimes funny, despite itself.
I’m not sure when the word “prostate” first entered my vocabulary. I probably didn’t consciously know the difference between “prostate” and “prostrate,” although I did know that the latter was how TV cops usually found corpses posed. The word seemed overkill.
But I do know when the word “prostate” suddenly jumped big-time center stage for me. I was the Dean of Students at a small college in Saint Charles, Illinois. It was an all-girls’ school then, on the verge of going co-ed (for survival). I was one of the few males (and non-nuns) in the administration. The town was small and there was a doctor, a general practitioner not too far from campus, where we directed college lasses in medical need.
This time I was a dude in need. I had been feeling lousy: a very sore back, lots of general stiffness, trouble either over-urinating (without pain), or hardly at all. I had exercised every day for years but it got so bad that I stopped exercising at all. So I made an appointment with the same doctor.
He was kind of grumpy and acted like he had hay in his shorts. He blasted about 60 questions at me while he touched parts of my body so fast he must’ve thought I was on fire. I don’t think he had any clue about what was wrong. He prescribed some potion and sent me home. I was to return in a week, dead or alive.
On the second visit, he didn’t waste any time at all. He had me drop my drawers, bend over, and grab the sides of his exam table. He gloved up and headed digitally into my rectum. I had no idea what he was doing, but it wasn’t much. He could hardly get in. Before I felt anything at all, he broke out laughing and said, “Well, hello there.” Who was he talking to? He told me to get dressed and have a seat. He chuckled. Chuckling, do-nothing doctors make me nervous,
“You know what a prostate is?” he asked. Nobody likes to look stupid, particularly a college dean, so I said yes, of course.
“You’ve got the prostate of all prostates. It’s so inflamed it’s almost popping out your rear end,” he said, and smiled like he had just seen the posterior Holy Grail. Wow, I thought, resisting a quick finger check to see if he was kidding. “Is it serious?” I asked.
“It’s a bit odd, you being so short and all,” he said, as he pulled out his script pad and made scratches. “Can’t tell if it’s bacterial or viral. We can’t do much about the viral. They usually go away or shrink on their own—until they come back. I can give you some antibiotics for the bacteria. Take the pills until they’re gone. If you still hurt, come on back and we’ll do something else.”
“That’s why I feel lousy?”
“Looks that way. These prostates are a big pain in the ass!” he said, and laughed like he’d just invented the joke of the decade.
I guess the medicine worked, because when I finally got around to checking the protrusion myself, it was gone. I finished the tonic, got back to exercising, and forgot about my new, overfed prostate. I didn’t even read up on it, the whole thing sounded so absurd.
Then it came back. I directed the Atlantic coast CARE program in northern Colombia for several years, mostly working with the community development Peace Corps volunteers. That’s when I found out that prostatitis was endemic in Latin America. I could tell mine was acting up because I had to pee a lot more, with more urgency, than other guys. But you get used to it. The prostate of all prostates and I co-existed, and if it ever shamelessly extruded I never knew about it, though if it had, the Peace Corps volunteers would have told me (and all of northern Colombia) in a latino moment.
Prostatitis moved in, a scruffy buddy, when I was in my mid-20s, just sitting somewhere in my groin and minding its own business while doubling my peeing regimen and sharpening my eye for doors to men’s rooms.
That was the era of free sex, and while I mostly watched it pass by and got precious little free sex, I was doubly careful about my rare and probably not so lucky lady mates. You never knew. If you listened at all, you did know that venereal disease was rampant, though very few of the afflicted confessed or wore “INFECTED” signs on their forehead, fly, or bra. Whenever I seemed to be most aggrieved at elimination time or my always-hanging member exuded a suspicious drip, the biggest confusion was whether my prostate was just acting up or if I had been unknowingly enlisted in the “clap” brigade. I had one clue: the prostate inflammation almost always came with a lower backache.
Then AIDs appeared, and that remixed the stew. At first we heard it was a gay male issue, then artsy gays only—no danger to me in either case. Unless it was also being given through handshakes or at laundromats. I felt sorry for the afflicted but I also avoided anybody meeting those vague descriptions. Still, when the prostate flared, as it did every few months (sometimes for months), so much misinformation was flying around about AIDs it was impossible to cavalierly dismiss it, particularly since many of its bearers were white Anglo males who looked alarmingly like me.
I think I was checked for venereal contamination three times. Before my second and third (and last) marriages I did so to assure my wives-to-be that that I wasn’t a hotbed of infection. And when I was single and at least 50 they conducted a pilot study in Santa Maria, CA, where you could go to the county health clinic to get a free blood analysis if you also got an AIDs checkup. It took the nurses about ten seconds to draw the blood, but two weeks to provide the results. Even though the chance of my having AIDs, in my mind, was about as likely as my having two tongues, every time I felt my prostate act up during those weeks I started to sweat. On results day I cycled over to the health center and dallied in the reception room a good 15 minutes before I asked to see my results. Whew! HIV-free. I was hugely relieved to hear what I already knew. Whew again!
What brought my furtive prostate most clearly into focus were the PSA tests that doctors began including in every lab exam. My PSA number usually hovered at about four, which most of my GPs said was a bit high but no issue.
With one exception. If I recall, the PSA was six-something. So I was sent to a urologist who ordered a biopsy just to be sure. (That was about 10 years back and it just plain hurt—and bled for days.) But I was cancer-free.
Then I joined a jumbo not-for-profit health plan in Marin County (California) six years ago. My PSA promptly jumped to 10.8, then quickly to 21.6. Another biopsy, via a painless and bloodless electronic seeing-eye wand that slid and peeked into every cranny. The urologist could see what the wand saw and his on-the-spot preliminary reading found me cancer-free. I was in my early 70s and I’d dodged bullet #2! All that remained was the final diagnosis a few days later. Some dodge. The size of the prostate of all prostates had made a full visual (or gloved finger) check impossible. In the back at the top, non-metastasized, sat some stage 1, #3 cancer.
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