After decades caring for his wife in hospitals, a man stepped into the cancer center for himself and discovered an unexpected brotherhood waiting there.
The receptionist asked him to verify his date of birth. For years, he had encouraged fellow caregivers to prioritize their own health rather than waiting until a crisis forced the issue. This experience only reinforced that conviction.
She glanced down at the chart in her hand and then back at him with a puzzled expression. Before she could say anything, he caught himself.
“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, he had automatically answered with the date he’d given thousands of times before.
This time, however, he was the patient. He 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.
He had spent most of his adult life in hospitals because of someone else. This time, they called his name.
Looking around the waiting room, he realized he was easily the youngest man there. That did not happen to him very often anymore. Later, one staff member told him most of their patients were in their 70s and beyond. Sometimes, they saw men in their 60s like him, and every so often someone in his 50s.
He took a chair off to the side, careful not to intrude on this fraternity of men who seemed to know the ropes. They reminded him of the old men who gathered at Nick’s grocery and gas station near his childhood home in rural South Carolina. As a boy, he 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 possessed a remarkable conversational gift. They could begin with trout streams and end with urologists without anyone noticing where the turn occurred.
True to form, their 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 was the sort of thing you expect to hear in a cancer clinic in Montana.
He raised an eyebrow and thought, “How comforting.”
Soon enough, they called him back. The technicians positioned his legs, explained the process, and slid him into a machine that looked remarkably like something from an old “Star Trek” episode. If memory served, it resembled the device that kept Spock alive after somebody stole his brain.
After the instructions were complete, they eased him into position and left the room.
A few minutes later, one of the technicians returned looking slightly sheepish.
The expression on his face evidently communicated that he was not following.
He considered several responses, including one with an outstretched index finger that would have made his four brothers proud and the medical staff considerably less appreciative. Fortunately, decades of maturity prevailed.
“Maybe take a walk and see if anything happens.”
So there he 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, their household rivaled the campfire scene in “Blazing Saddles.”
The problem was they had instructed him 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 approached certain situations with caution for good reasons.
Eventually, however, everything worked itself out.
The imaging was completed, the planning was finished, and in a few days, he would return to begin treatment.
As he left, he noticed the bell hanging in the hallway. He had seen bells like that before. Patients rang them when treatment ended.
Lord willing, he would ring that bell himself within a month.
Driving home, he 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.
Eventually, if you stayed on any road long enough, you stopped asking for directions and started giving them.
One day, perhaps sooner than he would like to admit, he might be the guy telling stories to the new kid who walked through the door — even if the story involved a gas bubble that needed to be walked off.
For years, he had encouraged fellow caregivers to prioritize their own health rather than waiting until a crisis forced the issue. This experience only reinforced that conviction.
Prostate cancer is often called a silent disease. Fortunately, silent does not have to mean deadly.
