Operation Saturday

I had an MRI done on my prostate last week Thursday.  My RN said to call her Friday for the results.   When I did, whoever answered the phone asked me when the MRI was done and I said the day before and I asked if I could speak to my RN to get the results. "Oh no, those wouldn't be available yet.  Try again on Monday."

Wait another three days to find out if my cancer spread and I'm going to die?!?!

Normally I'd have argued and asked to speak to my RN, but I was at work and didn't feel like getting loud, so I decided to let it go and call again Monday.  No problem, I figured, I can wait.

The weekend wasn't too bad, I distracted myself with a lot of activity.  Monday morning at work I called and asked to speak to my RN again and I was told my surgeon would call me later in the afternoon.  I pushed this time and said my RN told me to call her for the results.  The woman I was talking to said my surgeon prefers to discuss the results directly with his patients so he'd call me.

Great, so now I won't know the results until sometime in the afternoon.  Fuck me.

Around 11:00 I emailed my RN and told her I was pretty anxious to get the results so could she please make sure my surgeon didn't forget to call.  She emailed me back soon after and said she'd make sure he got back to me.

So I waited.  And I waited.  And I waited.

It was horrible.  You can't stop your mind from imagining every possible outcome, many of which would be catastrophically bad.  "Unfortunately Mr. Hughes, the cancer has spread beyond the prostate and there are indications it's in your lymph nodes and bones.  At this point there's no need to operate, it wouldn't do any good.  We can manage the disease for a while and make you comfortable, but we can't cure it."  That, of course, was the worst fear.  Until I had the results, I knew that outcome was a possibility.  It seemed remote, but it was possible.

Or maybe it wouldn't be so bad?  Maybe the cancer would have spread but not so much that it couldn't still be cured?  Or maybe, hope of hopes, it was still contained to the prostate so the surgery would be the only and final treatment?  My surgeon seemed to expect that would be the case, but until we saw the MRI, there was no way to be sure.

My head was spinning all day.  My boss asked me to do things and I asked him stupid questions in response, things I knew the answers to, because I was having trouble thinking straight.  All I could think was, Am I going to die soon?  Is the cancer contained?  What will the MRI show?  When will they fucking call me?

My surgeon finally called me at 2:30 (he'd been in surgery all day until then).  He was very matter-of-fact and low-keyed and said the MRI basically showed what he expected to see.  I asked him if the cancer appeared to be contained and he said yes with the slight possibility of a microscopic breach of the prostate on one side, but it was so small it was hard to tell.  I asked him if this was going to be a problem and he said no, they'd just excise a bit of extra tissue there to be safe.  He said that's the benefit of the MRI, it shows things that might need more attention.  He said the breach, if it's even there, is extremely small and he's not concerned about it.  He said he expected the surgery would cure me and I wouldn't need any further treatment.

To call it a relief is an understatement, it was more like a reprieve.  It was the first good news I'd had since this whole mess started.

So my Surgery is the day after tomorrow.  I go in at about 10:30 Saturday morning - I'll get a confirmation call tomorrow - and will be operated on at about noon.  Depending on which brochure you read it will take between three and four hours or four and five hours.  So I guess that means roughly four hours.  I'll stay one night in the hospital in a private room in what sounds like a pretty fancy wing of the hospital, and there's a bed Melanie can have if she wants to spend the night.  I don't think this is the treatment everyone gets, I'm assuming it's because I'm an employee.  Of course yes, I am a VIP, but I always assumed that was just in my own mind.

So things are looking up.  The idea of the surgery makes me a little anxious, but only a little.  I've been operated on a bunch of times and I'm comfortable with the idea of being opened up and repaired.  I think of surgery like working on a car.  I normally recover pretty quickly, though this is a more involved surgery than I've had before so we'll see.  I put in for a medical absence from work of a few weeks and depending on how I'm doing, I may go back before it runs out.  I'm not too concerned about adapting to the changes in my anatomy either.  All indications are I'll have a good recovery and should bounce back pretty much to normal.  There may be some lingering changes, but from what I know - and looking at my age and overall health - I'm not too worried.  I have the best surgeon you can get for this, truly at the top of the profession, and that greatly reduces the side-effects of the procedure.  (He's the co-director of the department.)  In the end the surgery is a pretty easy choice; death on the one hand doing nothing versus surgery and the possibility of some physical changes afterwards.  No brainer.

All in all, at this point I'm feeling pretty lucky.  This could easily have been so much worse.

Furniture & Marriage

I've been noticing differences between Melanie and I lately. I mean, besides the obvious ones, that I have these hard proby guy parts and she has these moist succulant girly parts.

It's the way we consider, think about, treat, and respect furniture.

Melanie does.

I don't.

I'm not sure I can articulate this but I'll try.

My father was a furniture builder and made some amazing stuff. Half or more of our furniture when I was growing up was furniture he built, everything from our family room end tables to the dining room hutch. The basement was his wood shop, and it was - as we Hugheses are - well endowed. Table saws, band saws, work benches, hand tools, electric tools, glues, screws, spray cans, laqueres, paints, sandpapers, and sawdust, lots of sawdust. I've seen furniture built from the ground up and I recognize and like it.

I don't respect it as much as Melanie does. She and her family bought furniture. To get it, they, like most people, paid for it.

Maybe I always took furniture for granted?

Here's an example. If I had a party when my parents were away once - I'm not saying I did, but if I did - and someone let a cigarette burn out on the living room table, my parents might have been pissed off when they came home and saw the burn mark. (Oh man were they.) But I knew my father could make another table. I was in trouble, but it wasn't the same as a parent saying, "you just burned hundreds of dollars of my money." I knew the worse I'd be into my father was for the cost of the lumber.

So maybe I think of furniture as disposable, or easily replaceable.

Melanie likes good furniture. She's sacrificed for it and she has a good eye, and she has very nice furniture.

Very nice furniture.

Then, poor dear, she married me.

I have an antique banker's desk in our 2nd bedroom/office. I bought it years ago at a place near where I grew up, and I love it. Rich dark wood, desktop slightly cracked and uneven, rugged. Manly. It's a man's desk. They won't let you buy this desk until you promise whisky or beer will reside on it at all times, preferably near a defecating horse.

So here's what married life is to me. I put coasters under drinks before I put them down on furniture Melanie bought, but I put naked, condensation-dripping beer bottles down on my banker's desk and glory in the wonderful way this ages the wood.

Who's right?

Of course - you saw this coming, right? - both of us.  I think we understand and acknowledge the differences even if we don't adopt them. That's why I love her. For that, and for many other reasons.

Like those moist succulent girly parts...

Oh shit, sorry, need to go, left that naked Dewers on the dining room table a while back there...