Where Do I Begin?

My father is dying.

He’s not yet 59, and has lived a life full of regret.  And watching him dissolve into a pale, withered shell of himself is stirring up a firestorm of emotion in my gut, the front-runner of which is pity.

He’s been locked in a losing battle with metastatic prostate cancer for over two years now.  His is a rare, unrelenting, aggressive strain that has grown and spread through his body faster than kudzu vines on magnolia trees.  Had his urologist biopsied him any one of the four times my father had gone to him complaining of back pain and blood in the urine… had the doctor recognized that the small upticks of my father’s PSA level from 1.2 to 1.4 to 2.2 to 3.1 weren’t really small considering they were occurring in just one year’s time… my dad may have had a chance.  Instead, my dad was lulled into a false sense of calm with his doctor saying, “You just have a bad infection. Cancer doesn’t grow that quickly,” and given four rounds of increasingly strong, yet futile, antibiotics. By the time my father’s new wife of [at that point] six months rushed him to the Emergency Room because of intense lower back pain, he was, as the resident put it,  ”full of cancer”. 

Prostate cancer is usually a slow-grower, occurring in men over 50.  The reason it grows slowly is because it feeds on testosterone, a hormone whose production peaks at age 18 and falls off year after year as a man ages.  Usually, men with prostate cancer die of something else before the cancer gets them. 

As with most cancers, early detection goes a long way toward survival.  Since the prostate is in a small sack, finding cancerous cells early can usually  help prevent them from getting loose outside the sack.  It’s when the cancer cells go unchecked and have time to eat through the sack that you have to worry: this is what they call metastasizing. 

For whatever reason, cancer that begins in the prostate and spreads elsewhere is still called prostate cancer no matter where the lesions occur and whether or not it still exists at its point of origination.  Prostate cancer, once metastatic and on the move throughout the body, usually gets a foothold on the surface of the skeleton.  These lesions, over time, become excruciatingly painful, especially along ball & socket bones/joints such as the hip or shoulder since these bones, and hence the lesions, must grind as they articulate the limbs. 

My father’s cancer is covering most of his bones at this point.  The pain is unbearable without serious amounts of narcotics (like morphine), and there is a very fine line between pain managment and coherence.  A few milligrams one way or the other and he can be wide awake, alert and in incredible pain, or he can be a pain-free zombie.

As I have been coming to terms with what is happening to my dad, I have read volumes of books on diets, treatments, and stories from the trenches.  In speaking with friends and colleagues, so many… too many… of us have loved ones stricken with cancer in one form or another.  I lost my grandmother 3 years ago from cancer.  My other grandmother has been through chemo/radiation twice.  My aunt had cancer.  My cousin had cancer.  My best friend’s college roommate died of cancer.  Two of my college friends died from cancer before they were 30.  I could go on.  My point is that CANCER IS EVERYWHERE.   If it hasn’t yet touched your life, you’re lucky.  But, it will.

So, I thought this would be a good forum not just for cancer “survivors” in the traditional sense of having beaten the odds and beaten the disease personally, but for those of us who are cancer’s collateral damage - the children, grandchildren, wives, husbands, friends, lovers, parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and acquaintences of people facing down their own mortality.  Our bodies may not be battling the disease, but our hearts and souls are as we watch, helplessly, as the people we love go through the battle of their life, and often, their death.  

This is for us.