"YOU LOOK SO WELL, SEVENTY REALLY IS THE NEW SIXTY! BULL SHIT!

My journey with a diagnosis of prostate cancer has been well documented in my book The Prostate Chronicles - A Medical Memoir. It’s been a successful catalyst for an irreverent discussion of this cancer that involves one-in-nine men. The good news is that only one in thirty-nine die of prostate cancer. I confirmed that no matter what treatment choices a man makes to address this cancer, they all suck. 

I was diagnosed with T2C prostate cancer and, on August 30, 2018, a young X-Box surgeon removed my prostate using the da Vinci robot. In June of 2019, I celebrated my eight decade by turning seventy and going to the U.S. Open at Pebble Beach, CA. My friends commented on how good I looked, blah,blah, blah. One friend blurted out that seventy is the new sixty! Bulll Shit was my retort. 

At sixty, I didn’t have prostate cancer. My wife and I enjoyed a great life of intimacy, and I didn’t have to pee every twenty minutes. On the plus side, I was above ground and not pushing up daisies. I am a now a seventy-year-old prostate cancer survivor.  I’m looking over the horizon at turning seventy-one, seventy-five, and yikes eighty!

Then the phone rings. it’s the young nurse from my urologist’s office. Every six months, my anxiety increases with this call.  she reminds me it’s time for my routine appointment for a High Velocity PSA blood test. This will be the fifth or sixth PSA test since the da Vinci Robot removed my prostate. Odds are I won’t roll snake eyes with the PSA results but there’s always a chance of recurrence.

2020 is a new decade and I’ll be seventy-one in June. Yesterday, I reviewed my life insurance. If seventy is the new sixty, then why are my insurance premiums going up? At age seventy-one, my runway is much shorter, perhaps ten or fifteen years. I’m concerned about life insurance, and rolling the dice to insure that my wife, Karen, is taken care of, should I pass into the great ether first. 

Then boom! It hits me and the anxiety meter goes off the charts. The “what ifs” have been driving a steady staccato of negative thoughts.

It has been a wet winter in North Texas, so golf and especially Pickleball have been put on hold. On several sunny days last month, I made it to the courts. My Pickleball peeps welcomeD me back and always asked if everything is “normal”. The reality is that it is not normal but the alternative is much worse. 

I have my mind, my free will, and my faith in God. And especially, a supportive, loving wife, who’s now having to deal with her mother’s failing health. My parents passed a few years ago, and I can do nothing to ease her pain of impending loss. So, no, I am not normal, but thanks for asking.

I call the nurse and make the appointment for the PSA bloodletting, 30 days fro m today, as the “new sixty” rolls along into a new decade. 

Read more about my journey in The Prostate Chronicles A Medical Memoir. And what life was like over five decades, including the impact of the Vietnam War on my DKE fraternity brother Ron Sorter and myself. Letters In A Helmet, A Story of Fraternity and Brotherhood