The new kid in the waiting room
The receptionist asked me to verify my date of birth.
I gave her Gracie’s.
For years, I have encouraged fellow caregivers to pay attention to their own health rather than waiting until a crisis forces the issue. This experience has only reinforced that conviction.
She glanced down at the chart in her hand and then back at me with a puzzled expression. Before she could say anything, I caught myself.
“Oh ... that’s my wife’s birthday.”
After 40 years as a family caregiver through surgeries, appointments, hospital admissions, medications, insurance forms, and enough medical paperwork to clear a small forest, I had automatically answered with the date I have given thousands of times before.
This time, however, I was the patient.I was at the cancer center for imaging and treatment planning in preparation for radiation therapy for prostate cancer. Thanks to routine screenings and excellent physicians, it was caught early. The prognosis is excellent.
Still, it felt strange.
I have spent most of my adult life in hospitals because of someone else. This time, they called my name.
Looking around the waiting room, I realized I was easily the youngest man there. That does not happen to me very often anymore. Later, one staff member told me most of their patients are in their 70s and beyond. Sometimes, they see men in their 60s like me, and every so often someone in his 50s.
For this visit, I was the new kid.
I took a chair off to the side, careful not to intrude on this fraternity of men who seemed to know the ropes. They reminded me of the old men who gathered at Nick’s grocery and gas station near my childhood home in rural South Carolina. As a boy, I would stop in for a soda and candy bar while they held court around the coffee pot, solving problems that ranged from weather and crops to politics and church business.
The subjects changed from day to day. The cadence never did.
Men of a certain age possess a remarkable conversational gift. They can begin with trout streams and end with urologists without anyone noticing where the turn occurred.
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True to form, this conversation drifted toward prostate cancer, treatments, and the assorted indignities that accompany aging. One fellow described an examination during which the sheet covering him slipped.
Before he could react, the nurse matter-of-factly told him, “Don’t worry. If I see something I’ve never seen before, I’ll kill it.”
Such is the sort of thing you expect to hear in a cancer clinic in Montana.
The men laughed.
I raised an eyebrow and thought, “How comforting.”
But I still laughed.
Soon enough, they called me back. The technicians positioned my legs, explained the process, and slid me into a machine that looked remarkably like something from an old “Star Trek” episode. If memory serves, it resembled the device that kept Spock alive after somebody stole his brain.
After the instructions were complete, they eased me into position and left the room.
A few minutes later, one of the technicians returned looking slightly sheepish.
“We have a bit of a challenge.”
“Do tell,” I replied.
“There’s a gas bubble.”
The expression on my face evidently communicated that I was not following.
She delicately clarified.
“It’s in ... you.”
“Oh.”
I considered several responses, including one with my outstretched index finger that would have made my four brothers proud and the medical staff considerably less appreciative. Fortunately, decades of maturity prevailed.
“What do you recommend?” I asked.
“Maybe take a walk and see if anything happens.”
So there I was, strolling through the halls of a cancer center, trying to solve a problem that five boys growing up under one roof would have regarded as entirely manageable without professional consultation. At times, our household rivaled the campfire scene in “Blazing Saddles.”
The problem was that they had instructed me to drink a substantial amount of water beforehand to achieve the proper imaging. Solving one problem too enthusiastically threatened to create another.
Men over 50 approach certain situations with caution for good reasons.
Eventually, however, everything worked itself out.
Ahem.
The imaging was completed, the planning was finished, and in a few days, I will return to begin treatment.
As I left, I noticed the bell hanging in the hallway. I have seen bells like that before. Patients ring them when treatment ends.
Lord willing, I will ring that bell myself within a month.
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Driving home, I thought about those older men in the waiting room. None of them appeared eager to be there, but neither did they seem intimidated by it.
They knew where to park. They knew where the coffee was. They knew which jokes were worth telling.
In short, they knew the territory.
Eventually, if you stay on any road long enough, you stop asking for directions and start giving them.
One day, perhaps sooner than I would like to admit, I may be the guy telling stories to the new kid who walks through the door — even if the story involves a gas bubble that needed to be walked off.
For years, I have encouraged fellow caregivers to pay attention to their own health rather than waiting until a crisis forces the issue. This experience has only reinforced that conviction.
Prostate cancer is often called a silent disease.
Mine was.
Fortunately, silent does not have to mean deadly.