“The hair on my head is leaving me, turning white with fear,
abandoning me bald and bereft, like rats on a sinking ship.”
Do I sound depressed, distraught, uncharacteristically negative? Probably. This is the day of the dreaded prostate biopsy; revelation and consequences, the lady or the tiger. The moment of truth.
We all expect to live forever, to deny the death that happens to other less fortunate folks. We will remain healthy, happy, pain-free, free from John Wayne’s “the Big ‘C’, the unmentionable, sly, evasive, nasty little bit of metastasizing catastrophe which people whisper about with averted eyes, and which fills the local newspaper’s obituary page with little paragraphs and out-of-date photos of lost strangers’ ragged endings of life.
But for me, dear Horatio, I was expecting a happier ending to my play, this dizzying performance under the spotlights, in spite of the man behind the scrim whispering “elevated PSL’s”. How will this drama play out on the operating table today? Will the hero have a happy-ever-after epilogue? Will there be another act? And for how long? And what does it all mean anyway?
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