This will be a short post. A great Thanksgiving Day with my sister and her family and friends. Of course, all of us ate far more than we should have. But is was all so good. Leftovers in the morning, afternoon, and evening tomorrow!
Day 14 – Thankful
It’s hard to believe that it’s only been two weeks since I learned that I have cancer—it seems as though it’s been two years already. It just feels as though that day was a long, long time ago, but it really wasn’t.
That first Saturday—just a little more than 48 hours into this adventure—a friend asked something along the lines of “What are you learning from this?” In typical fashion, I had to pause and think about the answer. But not for too long.
I don’t recall the exact words that I said, but the lesson that I am learning from this—the silver lining in this cloud—is the importance and meaning of relationships. Relationships that, perhaps, I had taken for granted or didn’t really fully understand how deep they are.
You have amazed and humbled me with your offers of support, kind thoughts, and prayers over these last two weeks. Heck, I never expected this blog to garner much interest, but we’re approaching 500 visits since I launched this on Sunday, 14 November. That’s almost 50 hits a day! So that tells me that my relationships are much stronger than I may have thought they were. That, or there’s nothing on TV and you have nothing better to do than read these ramblings… J
With a little bit of luck and a lot of cooperative weather, I’ll be spending tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day, with my sister, her family, and a cousin, and I’ll raise a glass to everyone who’s been by my side through this latest chapter in my life. Your support has been my biggest ally in getting me through this. So all I can say is…
Thanks much! Vielen Dank! Muchos gracias! Merci beaucoup! ありがとうございます。! Mahalo!
Oh.
And Happy Thanksgiving!!
Day 13 – Reflection
Today was a good day at work, but having to call the surgeon’s office at lunch put me in a reflective mood.
First, I called the surgeon in Cincinnati that I have the appointment with on December 9th. They sent me some paperwork to fill out in advance of the office visit, and they also asked me to call to go through my medical history.
For nearly 15 minutes, I’m answering questions about my background and that of my family. I guess they need to be thorough in advance of a major surgery, but some of the questions seemed completely unrelated to my cancer.
I tried calling the surgeon in Indy again, this time using the correct phone number. When I got through the endless automated menu, I got a voicemail message telling me that she was out of the office for the rest of the afternoon and to call back tomorrow. Frustrating.
I’m beginning to doubt the need to speak to two surgeons and to do my “comparison shopping.” Will it really make a difference? I don’t know. It’s a leap of faith no matter which one I select. Is it really worth the hassle and additional waiting to try to get in to see another surgeon?
Ultimately, the prudent side of me will probably go through with talking to both. It’s just something that I wish was done and the surgery was scheduled.
So those thoughts had a little cloud hovering over me on what otherwise was a great day.
Day 12 – Routine
I’m not sure what happened last night, but I was back to tossing and turning for some reason. I looked at the clock: 1:33 AM. Then again: 3:40 AM. Hopefully there won’t be a repeat tonight.
Today was a great day at work. I was very focused for the first time in a long time. The thoughts of cancer remain ever-present, but now they’re not predominating every moment as they were a week ago.
I did, however, take some time over lunch to hop onto our health insurance provider’s website to check to see if the surgeons being recommended to me are part of our plan. They are. That’s always a good thing.
I tried contacting the surgeon who operated on our VP (the coworker I spoke with on Friday) but only got the squealing of a fax modem. I’ll have to find his right phone number and try again.
Last Friday, I was speaking to a different coworker and learned that his father had had prostate cancer and underwent a robotic radical prostatectomy several years earlier. He offered to ask his father who his surgeon was, and I found out today that it was the same surgeon that my urologist recommended. The outcome was successful. My coworker’s father offered to talk to me about it if I want, and I will probably take him up on his offer soon.
I need to prepare a list of questions for the surgeon (and my coworker’s father), just as I did for the visit to the urologist. For me, it really helps to have them written down because I’ll likely forget one or two if the conversation goes off on a tangent.
Another reason today was such a great day was the weather. It’s a balmy 70 degrees at 7:30 PM which is highly unusually for this time of year. Rather than drive home for lunch, I walked the mile to my house, enjoying the warm southerly breeze along the way.
Right after work, I drove to Jungle Jim’s Market in Cincinnati to pick up some landjägers (German salami sticks) for Thanksgiving with my sister and her family. (Didn’t you know… There were a couple of Germans that came over on the Mayflower in 1620!!) It’s kind of a family tradition for the holidays…
Well, time to pay the next medical bill that arrived in the mail today…
Day 11 – Fun
Wow. It was such a great day that I almost forgot to update the blog! If that doesn’t tell you how things are going, I don’t know what will.
I’m getting back into a more routine sleep pattern, waking at more reasonable hours instead of the 3 AM sessions early last week. That’s good.
Today was spent with a coworker and her family. She asked me to take some photos of her family using my new toy (camera) for their Christmas cards this season. It was a fun, warm afternoon and they were more than patient as I continued to learn the features of my camera. Plus, it’s always fun being around a 13-month old child. You have to be quick on your toes and even faster on the shutter release. There were some real “keepers” and a couple of duds.
It was a great distraction from the last week.
On the drive back, I caught up with an old Navy buddy on the phone. (Not that she’s old… Just that it’s an old friendship!) She’s been helping her aging father, and she had some good insights into hospitals and timing of surgeries. She suggested having the surgery earlier in the week rather than later, because trying to get someone discharged out of the hospital on a weekend is next to impossible (based on her experience with her father). Good to know.
So that’s it for this Sunday night. A load of laundry needs to be ironed, and then I’m off to bed.
Day 10 – Pick One, Any One
So I woke up in a fog this morning.
I could barely see out the window it was so foggy. Literally. Oh. And the half a bottle of chardonnay from the night before may have helped a tad.
A former co-worker visited last night. We hadn’t seen each other in just over two years, so when I learned she would be in the area for a conference it made sense for her to stop for a visit. We had fun getting caught up over dinner (yes, I cooked!), talking mostly about things other than cancer, and boring her to tears with photos of my last European adventure. It was a great evening.
Once she headed off to the conference this morning, it was a pretty normal day around the house. By late morning, I was zapped and fell back into bed for an hour or so. I think all of the stress of the last week really took a larger toll on my body than I thought it did. I’m going to have to watch that going forward. I certainly don’t want stress to run down my immune system.
Unfortunately, the thing that I’m beginning to stress over is the selection of the surgeon for the prostatectomy. My urologist wasn’t of much help on Thursday.
He operates out of a group of 20 or so urologists in the greater Cincinnati area. He recommended two surgeons within his group to perform the surgery. Both do “hundreds” of robotic prostatectomies each year. Yet when I asked my urologist which doctor he would use if he was the one being operated on, he said, “Both are good.”
He operates out of a group of 20 or so urologists in the greater Cincinnati area. He recommended two surgeons within his group to perform the surgery. Both do “hundreds” of robotic prostatectomies each year. Yet when I asked my urologist which doctor he would use if he was the one being operated on, he said, “Both are good.”
One surgeon operates out of one hospital and the other out of a different hospital. I asked which hospital would he prefer to be in, and again, “Both are good.” He did his residency in the first hospital and currently operates out of the second.
Finally, I asked him if there was a good website that I could visit to learn about the doctors or hospitals and their records, and he offered up Angie’s List. “But the people who put comments on sites like that only write negative things,” he said. Hmmm… Sounds like the voice of experience to me.
Needless to say, I was a bit miffed by his non-committal answers.
I know this is the German, Capricorn, analytical side of me coming out, but this is my body and I don’t want this to be a pure crap shoot. If one doctor has a higher complication rate than the other, that would factor into my decision. If one hospital has a higher infection rate than another, that, too, would factor into my decision. Of course, finding the right surgeon is the primary driver; pick the wrong one and I could be peeing in my pants the rest of my life. (And, yes, I know that even great surgeons can have a crappy day. There is no such thing as risk-free surgery.)
I did stumble across a website called Health Grades (see link to the right) that rates doctors and hospitals, but I haven’t had time to research who they are, how independent they are, and how they develop their ratings.
If anyone out there in blog land knows of other ways to research surgeons, I’m all ears! (Post a comment or, preferrably, send an e-mail using the e-mail link in my profile.)
I’ll have to admit that the VP I spoke to yesterday highly recommended his surgeon in Indianapolis. He’s getting me the contact information so I can check him out.
I don’t want to drag this analysis out, either. I want it to be thorough but quick. It’s kind of odd, but when I think about the fact that I have cancer, I sometimes think that I’ve got little critters living inside me. Gremlins. I don’t know. Weird, eh? Anyhow, if they’re not going to pay rent, they’re going to be evicted, sooner rather than later.
I don’t want to drag this analysis out, either. I want it to be thorough but quick. It’s kind of odd, but when I think about the fact that I have cancer, I sometimes think that I’ve got little critters living inside me. Gremlins. I don’t know. Weird, eh? Anyhow, if they’re not going to pay rent, they’re going to be evicted, sooner rather than later.
An administrative note about this blog…
You may have noticed that I keep people’s names out of my narrative. That’s intentional. Given the fact that any person on the planet with Internet access can read this blog, I prefer to maintain some level of privacy for all of us.
Day 9 – Normalcy?
Wow. A pretty normal day today. Although when I awoke at 5:00 AM (much better than 3:00 AM the night before!), the first thing that popped into my head was related to… You guessed it. Oh well. I guess that’s the new norm for a while.
I sent an e-mail to one of our company’s VP’s this morning. He had been through this about 4 years ago, and I offered to take him out to lunch if he’d be willing to share his experience with me so that I could be better educated and make a more informed decision about my treatment options. I had met the guy a couple of times in the past but it’s not like I hang out with him, so I was a bit apprehensive about approaching him. Within 10 minutes of the e-mail going out, he called me.
We spoke for nearly 30 minutes, and it was good to get his insight on both the surgeon and hospital selection process, and on the operation and its side effects. (I’ll spare the details for now.)
So the next step is to really do some homework on surgeons and hospital facilities. I hear a spreadsheet calling my name…
I also spent a bit of the day going through all that I pushed off the radar screen in the last few days, trying to get myself back on track and organized to hit the ground running next week, both personally and professionally.
So I think this weekend has some relaxation and some research in store for it… The sooner I get the treatment lined up, the sooner all of this will be in the rear view mirror. (And, no that doesn’t mean I’m rushing the decision. It means I know how long it will take to do my analysis!!)
Day 8 – Oh Happy Day!
The bone scan was clean—no spreading of cancer! Woo-hoo!
The day started at 3:00 AM with a trip to the bathroom (TMI, I know…) and me being unable to fall back asleep from there. Random thoughts about anything and everything just bounced around inside my head.
I made it to work and by 10:00 AM, began to get uptight about the 11:15 AM appointment. Luckily, the doctor was running almost on schedule. I was in the exam room by 11:20, he arrived by 11:30, and I was on the phone to my sister at noon with the good news.
I had two meetings scheduled after lunch, and by the end of the second one, I was out of gas. Between the 3 AM wake-up and being a bit more uptight about the results that I expected, I’m toast. This cancer crap is exhausting!
So that’s two days in a row that have been pretty positive. Let me chart that in a spreadsheet with a linear regression trend line!
Next step: A nap.
Day 7 – Rebound
What a difference a day makes.
But before getting into that, am I really that predictable? When I spoke with two people about this—in separate conversations in the last 24 hours—one of the first things they both asked was, “How big is your spreadsheet?” Not one, but two! Of course, they’re referring to my propensity to put things into spreadsheets for detailed analysis. Sorry to disappoint, but “Data Dan” has NOT created a spreadsheet for this journey. Yet. (Yes, I’m a geek and damned proud of it!)
So I woke up this morning in a much better frame of mind and that carried through the entire day. I was focused at work and got caught up on a few things that have been casualties of all of these distractions. I’m hopeful that the trend will continue, but wise enough to know that there are probably rough days ahead yet.
I’m not at all worked up about getting the bone scan results tomorrow around noon, which is quite contrary to what I would have predicted a couple of days ago. I’ll try to get the word out as quickly as I can, but I do know that my afternoon is booked with meetings, so getting to the blog may take a while.
I did call for the consultation appointment with the surgeon and that will be late in the afternoon on Thursday, 9 December. I’ll have to confirm that we’ll have the colonoscopy results by then (scheduled on 6 December).
I ended the night with dinner at my friends’ home—a very enjoyable evening and a great close to a much better day.
I guess when you hit a wall, you bounce off and try again.
Day 6 – The Wall
No, not the classic Pink Floyd album. The emotional wall that I hit about 6 AM this morning.
I think the adrenalin rush from the last few days finally ended, and I came crashing down. I just wanted to turn a switch off and have the constant thoughts about all of this go away. And when I say constant, I mean every-freakin’-waking-moment constant. It’s exhausting.
Rather than reading my not-so-best seller book last night, I took a pad of paper to bed and wrote down a dozen questions for my follow-up visit with the urologist. When I woke up this morning, I wrote down one or two more amplifying questions. Go to bed thinking about it; wake up thinking about it. Not good. But, I suppose that’s to be expected this early in the diagnosis and treatment game.
When I got to work, I really wasn’t sure that I was going to be able to function effectively. But a couple of attentive listeners passed by my door early in the day and let me vent. (You know who you are… Thanks!) Not long after, I was able to plow through the emotional roadblock and begin work on a weekly report that I run. The simple act of concentrating on spreadsheets and numbers was enough to slowly put some of the thoughts out of my head (or at least to make them appear less frequently).
Three-quarters of the conversation at lunch with a friend was about something other than cancer, and that was refreshing. A couple of meetings after lunch also helped put the thoughts to the side for a while. The moral of the story: Keep busy with other things.
Still, I have research to do, test results to wait for, and decisions to make, and all of those require thinking about this so I won’t be able to shut this off for the foreseeable future.
So what do I keep thinking about? Oddly, it’s not the Big Question. I don’t worry about death or dying. It’s going to happen to the best of us no matter how hard we try to avoid it. We can’t control how or when, so why get worked up about it? I just focus on the here and now: How do I get through today? When do I get my next set of test results? What’s the next step? Thinking too far ahead of the next set of facts won’t do me any good.
Now, back to Pink Floyd…
Before I started working in manufacturing, the first thing that I would do when I came home was turn on the stereo. But after a few short years of working in the constant din of the shop floor, I opted for pure silence when I came home. The stereo stayed off. Now music is playing once again to help soothe and distract. The only drawback is having to crank the Victrola every ten minutes…
So the day started pretty rough and ended much better… I think I’m at the beginning of settling into the new norm for me. And thanks to all of you for your words of support. They mean a lot to me.
Next event: Bone scan results Thursday around noon.
Dan's Journey through Prostate Cancer 