Worst part is the waiting

You have your good news when the boss presents you with a $1 per hour raise.

Your great news comes when your daughter announces that in nine months you’ll become a grandfather.

And then you have your everyday variety of life-saving news; the kind you know means that you’ll have the opportunity to collect on your boss’ generosity and your daughter’s unspeakably wonderful gift.

Last Friday I was awarded the last of these news announcements, thanks to a cell phone call from my urologist, Dr. Lawrence Wolkoff.

(Amazing, isn’t it that when a person is bushwhacked by some sort of serious ailment that all of a sudden a physician becomes “my” doctor? Sorry, I digress.)

Wolkoff called to say that the four lymph nodes he extracted from around my cancerous prostate gland were all clear. Thus, that most horrible of all horrible diseases remains locked away in my slightly larger than average-walnut-size prostate. Consequently, the enemy is surrounded.

The lymph nodes were removed with precision care three days earlier, sent to a pathologist who was assigned the task of reading the organs’ tea leaves.

From this rather mundane procedure I was pronounced fit for active duty on an operating table at some point within the next several weeks. That is when Wolkoff will team up with radiological oncologist Jon Prescott to snipe away at the diseased prostate.

While Wolkoff will insert an image-making tool into my rectum and guide it to the nearby prostate gland, Prescott will arm and then man the cancer-fighting armament that will fire rice grain-sized radioactive titanium capsules into the two cancerous tumors and surrounding tissue.

With careful and deliberate motions Prescott will squeeze the trigger anywhere from 75 to 150 times.

All the while I’ll be slumbering thanks to some really potent happy/sleepy juice poured into my system by anesthesiologist John Hagopian.

Don’t get me wrong, though. I’m not complaining about the medical equivalent of the Three Musketeers taking on my case. Just the opposite, in fact.

That last Friday I cleared a really tall hurdle to find myself in front of this next one leaves me happy. And thankful.

For half a week as I recuperated at home from the lymph node removal/biopsy phase of the process I was something of a basket case.

I’ve never been one to handle anxiety very well, and it showed as friend upon friend upon co-worker upon church brother/sister told me they were thinking of me, praying for me and more typically, both.

Finally the prayers had sunk in along with the observation that I’d have to deal with the cancer regardless of any actuary table on survival rates.

So on Friday morning when I awoke I found myself curiously - and refreshingly - at peace. Hopeful, of course, that the news would be rated AAA-grade yet as prepared for any bad news as one possibly could be under such circumstances.

Sometime around 10:30 a.m., I believe, Wolkoff called to say the pathology report was written as a clean slate.

With my eyes closed and a relaxed exhaling of air I silently said “thank you” to the One who delivers before verbally repeating it for the record to Wolkoff.

This trip is not over, of course. I still have to meet with Prescott, take in the actual two-hour “seed” implantation, face possible unfortunate and uncomfortable side effects as well as in the very long-term encounter a stretch of follow-up tests.

Yet now the trail appears not so steep nor the path ensnared by the vines of distress. I’m going to make it, this I believe.


- Jeffrey L. Frischkorn
JFrischkorn@News-Herald.com
Twitter: @Fieldkorn