(Editor’s note: This is the most touching story I have read/heard about someone being diagnosed with prostate cancer. Peter Lautz, a therapist, wrote this story in 2017. I won’t give you any spoilers. Please read it and share your thoughts in the comment bubble above. If you also want to share your reflections on your prostate cancer experience, let me know. )
By Peter Lautz
The melaleuca outside the living room window leans as it sways in afternoon breezes, finally transformed from a gangly bush into an actual tree. I’ve been waiting for a year or two to see this happen; it makes me happy to see these wispy branches reaching higher.
My dad loved azaleas and fuchsias, manicured lawns, gardening, Ella Fitzgerald, Broadway show tunes, especially Ethel Merman in ‘Gypsy’, good food, homemade lemon meringue pie, money and order, kids who didn’t run down the stairs or across the grass, were quiet and minded while Ethel belted ‘Mr. Goldstone’ throughout our house.
(Peter Lautz.)
He died 2 ½ weeks’ ago. Died in the hospital bed where he’d lain for days and days at a board and care home on the flanks of ritzy Mt Helix. Where a bedsore on his left hip made him miserable until that wound finally healed, taking many months and more than one hospital stay.
This home run by strangers where he’d stayed for 5 months after a bad fall in his filthy apartment, forgetting where he was and why. When he was able to walk, up until a few months’ ago, my father’s gait could only be called ‘drunken’. Severely wasted drunken, scary to behold drunken. You had to hold your breath and simply hope, watching the crazy stagger and weave up steep cement stairs to his second story home, an old Southern Sheriff zig-zagging, way past his prime. He refused to use a walker or a cane.
(Victor Lautz.)
My sisters and brother-in-law Joe were with dad and me as he breathed his last breath.
Two hours after he was gone the hospice nurse Don and I stood with his mostly naked, emaciated body while Don removed the catheter from his penis, the strange tube and clear bag that had bewildered him, caused him much consternation. He’d hated this device, this unwelcome constraint, having had to wear it for months.
Suddenly, here in the last space my dad would ever inhabit, my cell phone rang and contrary to my norm, I answered the call from a number I didn’t recognize thinking it might be the funeral home people lost on their way to pick up dad’s body for cremation. The caller, a man, was initially hesitant. Then he spoke with more vigor; the voice turned out to be that of my urologist whom I simply called ‘Dr I’ because of the multiple, difficult to pronounce, syllables of his last name.
“Hello Mr Lautz. How are you?” “Well, Doctor, not so well..my father just died this morning..”
“Oh….I’m very sorry..very sorry to hear this….Mr Lautz, I have the results of your biopsy.”
My focus earthquaked from this final good-bye to dad as I stepped into the dingy hall outside the bedroom. “Yes….?” “I’m sorry to tell you, but you have prostate cancer, Mr Lautz.”
The chipped yellow paint and scuff marks on hallway doors suddenly took on sinister tones.
Very ugly, like cancer.
I could tell the doctor felt badly, the poor guy is young and now giving me bad news upon the heels of my dad’s death. I felt unreal and very vulnerable, having been sure that the biopsy done 2 weeks earlier would be negative. I’d been wrong.
And now, it’s 2 weeks after that auspicious call in the hallway, dad’s corpse 10 feet away, my family sitting unawares in the dining room of this house on a boulder-strewn hill east of San Diego.
I slowly am realizing I do have cancer in a walnut-sized gland deep in the core of my body. Any next steps are as of yet quite unclear. Dad dies, cancer arrives. Where this old boat sails now, anybody’s guess.
My predictive abilities, clearly deficient.
Today, several good buddies and I hung out in my living room to talk about our lives. To laugh together. To care about our triumphs and travails. It felt good to see them. To be with them.
When they departed, I listened to lots of Van Morrison, his songs from the old days. Seemed like the right thing to do. He’s a white man with soul in my book. Always will be. Songs like ‘Rave On John Donne, Rave On’, live performance at the Belfast Grand Opera House. Maybe I’ll go there one day.
Then, I brewed a big cup of black coffee to carry me through the afternoon and into the night; and now sitting down in my favorite chair here in the living room, now I see how my bush league days are over, how I’m watching the once spindly melaleuca in the front yard stretch higher, skywards, shining through the open window.
( Peter Lautz is a 74-year-old resident of Chula Vista, a suburb of San Diego. He recently retired as “a psychotherapist (ironically often working with men as they adapt to illness).” On the heels of his father Victor’s death in 2017, Peter was diagnosed with two small lesions of favorable intermediate-risk prostate cancer, which has been stable. He has been on Active Surveillance, close monitoring, ever since.
(Peter also has a subtype of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma known as follicular lymphoma, which has been treated successfully. Peter’s father had an enlarged prostate but was never diagnosed with prostate cancer, though he also was diagnosed with follicular lymphoma.
( FYI: Melaleuca alternifolia, also known as a tea tree, is a small evergreen that enjoys warm climes. It is fragrant, with an exotic look. Herbalists swear by tea tree oil, made from its foliage.)
Catch these PCa webinars during Prostate Cancer Awareness Month
—Active Surveillance Patients International (ASPI) is sponsoring a free webinar on lifestyle research and low-risk prostate cancer from 12-1:30 p.m. Eastern, Saturday Sept. 30. Register here for “Applied Research and Lifestyles and Low-Risk Prostate Cancer: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwvdOGoqjwuE9CC8AI45nYdsj63e-iUnop6
The program features Drs. June Chan and Stacey Kenfield from UCSF.
(Stacey Kenfield, ScD.)
—PHEN (Prostate Health Education Network) will address issues relating to AS and Black men in a webinar, the 19th Annual “African American Prostate Cancer Disparity Summit.” https://tinyurl.com/mu7ebh4d
—Focal therapy? Listen to AS pioneer Dr. Laurence Klotz: https://ancan.org/webinar-is-focal-therapy-right-for-your-prostate-cancer/
—Lifestyle? Catch ASPI’s webinar with Dr. Stacy Loeb, of NYU, on lifestyle factors, such as diet. Great talk on a plant-based diet: https://aspatients.org/meeting/as-101-program-on-diet-and-nutritional-lifestyle/
—DNA. Todd Morgan, MD, chief of urologic surgery at the University of Michigan (Go Blue!) presented a great program on genomics to an AnCan webinar on Aug. 31. The video is available now for your viewing: https://ancan.org/webinar-how-and-why-prostate-cancer-genomic-tests-work/
Thanks for the comments, Ken. The repeated paragraphs were removed days ago from the online version. Always good to hear from you. Howard
My own humble obeservations and opinions about this article;
Please edit story to remove the duplicated paragraphs about a 'strong cup' of coffee.
The removal of a catheter resonated in me the ofttimes unpleasant and undignified finality of death. There is a difference between a sick parent, and a corpse. One form of morning is over, and another is about to begin.
There are many sickness that begin to visit men as we age. Prostate cancer can be a particularly nasty one. It carries a one-two sucker punch. Not only is it many mens first brush with a serious illness, but it also opens the door way to that dreaded 'C' disease.
I find it interesting and important that as our biological family begins to shrink, we also discover our family of choice- friends, buddies and pals also diminishes. Our ability to enlarge our scope of friends begins to fade as we begin to spend more and more time looking out after ourselves.
I wish I were a better writer. I long to feel sure that I am expressing myself correctly. That I am sharing those feelings and emotions I am experiencing, and trying to share. mason