An Aging Diagnosis

One step on the journey of life

I heard a riddle once. What percent of the U.S. population is aging? The answer: 100%. The following scenario occurred nearly 45 years ago – and I’m still aging!

*********************

“You have cancer. Surgery will be on Thursday.”

The doctor, after one glance and a gentle squeeze, as if testing the ripeness of an overgrown plum, issues his diagnostic directive.

Taken by surprise, in disbelief and denial, I blurt, “But I feel perfectly fine! What’re you talking about?” My wife draws a deep breath, exhales slowly, and looks at me with eyes that telegraph at once love, terror, and desperate determination about what has to be done. For my part, I try a delaying tactic. “Well,” I open the negotiation, “I’m pretty busy at work right now. Tomorrow, I’ll check my calendar and see what I can do.”

The doctor reiterates with firm resolution, “Surgery will be on Thursday!” To soften the blow, he shares that this sort of seminoma has a high recovery rate of 80%. Not too bad as odds go, but still… I shiver with foreboding that my life is about to take a new, possibly terrifying tack.

On Thursday, laid out on a gurney, prepped and naked but for a hospital gown, I am wheeled by an orderly to the spotlit center stage of an OR reeking of hospital sterility. While wife and daughter sit scared and worried in the waiting room, I feel no fear or existential threat. Though blinded and blinking in the blaze of lights, engineer that I am, I am instead drawn to observe, with curiosity, the band of white-clad bodies bustling about, busying themselves to relieve me of my larger-than-it-should-have-been “plum”.

As the anesthetist slowly seeps sleep to my veins, a specter suddenly loomed over me. It’s the surgeon, asking how I am feeling. “Pretty good, actually,” I manage to mutter. The specter raises his scalpel-grasping rubber-clad hand and reassures me, with a twinkle and an impishly menacing grin as my eyes flutter closed, “Well, we’ll take care of that.” The next thing I know, my eyes are fluttering open, and I realize he’s been true to his word. I am in agony and feel awful!

In the ensuing weeks of nauseating radiation and endless what’s-it grams and who’s-it scans, I learn from one doctor’s notes that I am a “white, middle-aged male.” “What??”, I exclaim in shock and disbelief. “Is that what I am?” OK, white, I have to admit. And “male”? Well, despite the plum plucking, I guess I still sorta qualify. But “middle aged”?? I am only newly 38! Is this an alarm clock waking my awareness of time advancing me inevitably along the road to, dare I say it, old age?

And then another tidbit of troubling news. The plum biopsy comes back showing a form of seminoma with survivability odds of only 50-50. Well, that certainly doesn’t sit well with the family! For a moment, even the normally placable I shiver with foreboding, wondering where this trauma drama is headed. Especially with all that work waiting for me at the office!

Well, where it’s headed is home – and a new beginning. With my mother’s insistence to leave Michigan and get back to California, I give notice at work, and, following Horace Greeley’s dictum to “go West, young – er, middle-aged – man”, we chart a new route in our lives, toward the steadily, and suddenly clearly, setting sun.