“So, yeah, it’s cancer.”
My urologist segued from talking about how inconvenient it was picking his daughter up at school that morning to dropping a cancer diagnosis on me without missing a beat. Two weeks earlier, I didn’t even have an urologist.
“Yeah,” he said, in a slightly nonplussed way, gazing at the results, “I was surprised myself.”
As my new, world-altering doctor spoke about cell cores and Gleason scores, probabilities of survival, incontinence and impotence, why surgery would be good and what kind would make the most sense, his voice literally faded out like every movie or TV show about a guy being told he had cancer… a classic Walter White moment, except I was me, and no one was filming anything at all.
I got diagnosed with prostate cancer Friday, June 13, 2014. On September 17 of that year, I got a test back telling me I was cancer-free. The three months in between were a crazy roller coaster ride with which about 180,000 men a year in America can identify.