Life is absurd. PCa is absurd.

Life is absurd. Pca is absurd. (Not the existential meaning, but ludicrous, ridiculous because of being irrational, incongruous, or illogical.) How is that?

1. It starts with a complete stranger sticking his finger waaay up where the sun don’t shine. This will happen on numerous occasions. It seemed like everyone I met wanted to do that.

2. That’s not the end. Other strange mechanical biopsy things get up there too.

3. You get a report with all kinds of strange terms and numbers. You frantically spend a week on the web having to learn in a week what a PhD in pathology learns in four years.

4. You have to make an impossible choice. Torch the darn thing or just kick it off the team completely.

5. You are required to put complete faith and trust with your life in a whole bunch of total strangers who may or may not have just had a knock-down drag-out with their significant other, been recently partying down, or just lost all their retirement money in the stock market.

6. If you elect the robot surgery, you find yourself in an extremely strange room, practically up-side down, with your body pumped full of gas, and cold steel arms rooting around in your innards, while being manipulated by a guy across the room sitting at a video game consol.

7. Afterwards, you find out, horror or horrors, that there IS something that can actually make Willy an inch or so shorter. (In my case, an inch that can ill afford to be lost.)

8. You will find yourself in conversations, possibly with someone you don‘t know, smiling serenely, while taking a massive piss in your pants.

9. You go to the supermarket and a hot little checkout mama slyly smiles at you. Whereupon you pass her a big package of male incontinence pads.

10. Willy goes on forced retirement. After so many years of enjoying his company, you don’t know if he’s going to ever get back on the job. You prod him with drugs, pumps, and injections.

11. With some new information you try to contact someone on your surgical "team" with a pressing question. Later you decide it would be easier to get the current locations of the surveillance drones on the Afgan-Pakistan border from the Pentagon.

I’m sure there are lots of others. Truly life is absurd.

Steve

Yup Steve,

That pretty much covers it.

Keep well,
Regards,
Bill

cocrgolfer,

You say, "Life is absurd. Pca is absurd. (Not the existential meaning ...)."

But I suspect that Camus, Sartre et al. would read differently now after PC than they did before.

And I always thought that you had to be on the losing side of a war in order to really understand existentialism! 

Zen9

Steve,

You nailed it.

Len

cocrgolfer, you need to copy this very accurate list into the Things I didn't know thread, so the future guys can learn from it...

Suppose that we started each point with
"You know that you are still alive when"

Hey, if the doc wants to get the sun off his fingers for a while, what the heck -- just so long as it isn't part of a post-mortem.