It’s oddly reassuring to rub elbows with famous people who had prostate cancer, like Dan Fogelberg, the soft-rock singer who grew up here in Peoria, Illinois. I can walk to the places he lived, went to high school, and to Bradley University where his dad was the band director and let him conduct a rehearsal when he was 14. Fogelberg’s songs like “Leader of the Band” and “Longer” were a mainstay of the soft-rock era of the 1970s, ’80s, and early ‘90s.
The same question dogs everyone who gets cancer: Where did it come from? It’s not a critical question because we already have cancer, and our focus is on getting rid of it.
Yet I wanted to know. If my cancer came from an outside source and is environmentally-caused, like exposure to a lawn herbicide or a crop pesticide, which seems to be a problem in agricultural areas, especially in Iowa and Illinois, then I want to stay away from it. Were there industrial carcinogens in my drinking water from fracking? Maybe a pathogen snuck in through a cut in my skin.
I am delighted that my new essay was published today by the Chautauqua Journal.
It’s called “Unmasking In the Monastery.” This makes me so happy!
https://www.chautauquajournal.com/post/unmasking-in-the-monastery
Happy Holy Fools Day! (I’m serious.)
Mark
While I’ve read quite a few memoirs by women about their breast or ovarian cancers, I haven’t found many men who were willing to write even an essay about their prostate cancer, and I think the reason is that prostate cancer hits men where their pride resides.
When we get cancer, we think we have to act like the cancer patients in the movies. People who have no experience with cancer also expect us to act like these stereotyped, sanitized, devoid-of-personality presentations. Don’t act when you have cancer. Let yourself experience what you are feeling and thinking.
When the radio said that Susan Sontag died on this day in 2004, I wrote her death date on my calendar so that every year I could remember her, as I do with other dead people who’ve influenced my life. Her birth date was also given, but I didn’t write that down. This struck me as curious. Would I rather grieve her loss or celebrate her birth and coming alive in her writings? One date affirms the beginnings of her creativity; the other boards her in with nails of sorrow.
Suzanne Strempek Shea, breast cancer
It’s in the quiet places that you can hear yourself breathe, places without time or expectations that hold you, where you feel the terror of cancer and find the resolve to live.
When Anne Pinkerton suggested I read Suzanne Shea’s book, Songs from a Lead-Lined Room, I thought it would be a short read because nothing much happened when I spent five weeks in the radiation chamber. You come in, lie down, try not to think about how much radiation is being beamed into your body, get radiated, and go home. Come back the next day, and do it again. Diagnosed at age 41 with breast cancer, Suzanne had surgery and radiation. I finally found a companion to my experience.
I’ve called my experiences with cancer by a number of names, and different ones for each step from diagnosis through two kinds of radiation and a year of anti-hormone therapy as I encountered fear, trauma, and loneliness, to where I am now, in surveillance, with post-treatment uncertainty as to whether the cancer is gone. I continue to deal with a number of side-effects that stubbornly don’t want to fade away, and I’ve had to make adjustments in my life to accommodate them. In the coming weeks, I will see a urologist and a cancer dietician looking for solutions.
I’d love to hear how you describe your experiences with cancer, and I’ll post what I hear back.
Tony Hoagland died of Stage 4 pancreatic cancer on October 23, 2018. He knew he had the cancer for only two years because this kind is hard to diagnose before it becomes terminal. Pancreatic cancer is potentially curable if the cancer is caught early, is on the head of the pancreas, and it hasn’t spread, then it can be surgically removed, followed by a course of chemotherapy.
