Prostate Cancer

For the past eight weeks I have been receiving radiation treatments for prostate cancer.  This will be my ninth and final week.  I think the statistics are that at least a third of the men in the U.S. will develop prostate cancer, and I believe it is generally when they are in their seventies.  I’m sure I could look all of this up on the internet, but it is one of those things I’d prefer not to know too much about.  That way I can just do what Dr. Alden and Dr. Rosen tell me to do without asking too many dumb questions.

The treatments themselves last six minutes each.  I have not succeeded in falling asleep during a treatment, but I’ve come close.  While the machine is working, music is piped into the room, either Elvis, the Beatles, or oldies.  Remember, all the patients are old men.  

The center is in Allentown off Hamilton Boulevard.  So far I’ve driven myself, and I don’t think that will change during the last week.  I did receive offers from about a dozen people to drive me if I needed a chauffeur.  I listen to books on tape (literally--I have a portable tape player) or lectures from the Teaching Company, so the trip seems short.

These last few weeks I have been getting some side effects, but they are the type of thing I’d prefer not to discuss in public, and so far it is nothing I can’t handle.

Perhaps the worst side effects are from the hormone shots that go with the radiation.  They give me hot flashes.  And when I tell that to women, they seem positively gleeful.