Wife: Stop Reading Those Forums

She has a valid point.

As I stated in another post, forums are highly tilted platforms - I know, I've created and administered very many of them. On forums like this you find that people come here for answers and if everything works out for them they put it behind them and the vast majority move on, and that makes sense. What remains are a few cheerleaders that came out the other side without issues and want to encourage others (I still do this for ex smokers after quitting over a decade ago), and the rest are people who still struggle.

When you read post after post of bad news - recurrence of the cancer, treatment side effects, etc, it can really pull you down. It's easy to take the viewpoint of "I have only the slightest chance of making it through this with only a new way to hold my bladder". I've read the studies, the majority of men are fine post op, but it's easy to think of it as a snowballs chance in hell. Even if it's 95% success, it's so very easy to fixate on that 5%.

This is what is happening with me. Every time I spent a lot of time reading this stuff I end up falling apart and last night was a pretty epic one. So bad that I woke up every 20-30 minutes dreading every aspect of my life post op (in 6 weeks). To the point of me seriously considering canceling my surgery and just letting nature take its course because if it's just going to come back and screw me in three years then why even fart with it.

Today I got my pre-op MRI so they have a good image to use for the surgery and while I had only an hour or so of sleep I was still pretty blue but not as totally in the dumps. It only took a nurse hooking me up for my contrast IV to say "so, it looks like you have a pretty big surgery coming up huh?" for me to lose it. I couldn't even talk and I could not stop tearing up for the next two hours. She saw the impact it had on me and, bless her sweetest heart, she apologized profusely and was so very compassionate and even held my hand to comfort me. That's how much on a razors edge I am right now.

I had some level of depression after my kidney cancer, but it can hold this one's beer. I've been hanging on by tooth and nail for two months trying to keep it together. As I explained to my wife: this takes 90% of my normal coping energy to manage, I have 10% left which means I have to manage running businesses and dealing with day to day with 10% in the tank. I'm trying to get in with a shrink to help me find better ways of dealing with this, but I think one way is for me to regiment what I read here.

I don't know what that regiment looks like right now, but I know I have to try to choose to read only certain topics and not get "involved" as is my nature to do and really deep dive into the topics because it's seriously screwing with my head. Maybe it's the dual cancers, maybe it's the silly season and maybe it's just me spending too much time reading negative when I really need to read positive.

This is a long post, partly as a pseudo journal for myself but also for other guys like me that have their treatment on the horizon and don't know how to cope with it.