Over My Shoulder

It's Up There... Just Over My Shoulder
January 2001

You've probably seen a kestrel right? It's one of those hawks that is able to hover. It flaps its wings like a hummingbird to create a stationary platform while it awaits a tell-tale movement in the weeds below. Well, I've got one hovering above me right now. Soon I'll be going in for a prostate biopsy. I've heard all kinds of tales about this procedure from "excruciatingly painful" to "just a little bite here and there." I'm suspicious of the latter and fearful of the former. My experience with biopsy is based upon a nightmarish event I experienced about thirty years ago when my urologist did a kidney biopsy on me. As I involuntarily jerked with pain he told me; "The kidneys don't have any nerve endings so this can't be painful."

Of course he'd never had one himself. This guy ranks right up at the top of my personal Pantheon of Jerks.

So, I don't really know how it's going to be, but I've got to do it because there's a lump on my prostate that wasn't there before. I tend not to get in to worry big time until the object of my concern gets closer in time. Well, it's time. What I've done to mitigate some of the worry is to check out the prostate sites on the Web. And there are some good ones. One of the best is www.prostatepointers.org. This site has all the pros and cons of treatment listed in reports from medical people and some of the alternative ideas on what to do "if"! The "if" is, of course, the big "C". Like the election of 2000, there is no consensus on what to do. Half the medical community says that it's most likely that if cancer is discovered, which IS likely, it will not be the fast spreading type. And if it is, well, there's not much that can be done anyway.

The other half says that the "Gold Standard", meaning the treatment of choice, is the prostectomy, removal of the prostate, before the thing has spread beyond the prostate gland itself. The dissent to this says that if spread has occurred ultimately nothing will stop it. All you do is buy a little timeand it's not good time at that. Meaning erectile dysfunction and incontinence. Of course, you're still alive, at least for awhile.

The conservative view councils watch-and-wait or, at most, the use of radioactive "seeds" placed in the prostate to kill the cancer itself while leaving surrounding healthy tissue intact.

They say, in general, that prostate cancer is unlike any other form of cancer and little is known about why it occurs or how to stop it. Or, in most cases, whether it should be messed with at all. As many men die of it as women do of breast cancer. Many more men have it however. By the way, research funding for prostate cancer is one fifth that allotted for breast cancer but it kills more men than AIDS.

My father's brother died of prostate cancer horribly. My father did not, though he had it, as do most men over the age of 50 (80-100% of men over 70).

For me, the kestrel is in the air, when and how he will pounce and what the outcome will be is yet to be determined. I only know he is there.

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NOTE; Since writing this I have come across a very good Web site (www.Prostateaction.org.) in it I found research from Johns Hopkins which states that a biopsy is unnecessary in 75% of cases and that a free PSA (fPSA) test, a new blood sampling technique, is better. I've cancelled the biop.

Coyote On Coyote - More about Coyote by Dick Prosapio

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