I Am Not a Medical Professional, Which Puts Me in Excellent Company

Observations from the trenches of prostate cancer, marriage, and the occasional bewildered goldfish

Let me be perfectly clear: I am not a medical professional. I don’t have a medical degree, a white coat, or a habit of gaslighting people with the phrase “it’s probably just stress.” I don’t even own a stethoscope, although I did once use a turkey baster to simulate one for Halloween. I’m not qualified to give advice, diagnose symptoms, interpret lab results, or pretend that “mild discomfort” means “you’re about to bleed out of an orifice you didn’t know you had.” But frankly, neither are most of the professionals I’ve met along this long and winding urethral journey—except maybe someone at the Mayo Clinic, who briefly made eye contact with me before vanishing into the Mayo ether like a benevolent specter of actual competence.

What I do offer is hard-won, hormone-deprived observation. I report live from the war zone of prostate cancer—not from the sanitized ivory towers of academic medicine, but from the battlefield of everyday absurdity, where grown men with hot flashes attempt to maintain dignity while their wives try not to suffocate them with a pillow at 2 a.m.

Let’s begin with the men. Prostate cancer men. We are a special breed. We shuffle into radiation waiting rooms, clutching foam donut cushions like emotional support animals. We talk about bowel movements with the kind of detail normally reserved for autopsy reports. We pretend not to care about our testosterone levels while secretly Googling “testosterone AND motorcycle” at 3:17 a.m. Then, after a long day of pretending everything is fine, we cry into the soft fur of the dog, who is far too polite to mention that we’ve been crying into her for the past six months. The goldfish, on the other hand, offers no such mercy—he stares silently from his tank, judging me with his googly little eyes like some aquatic Freud.

Then there are the wives. Dear God, the wives. Unsung heroines of the hormonal apocalypse. They endure our erratic moods, our conspiracy theories about Flomax, and our righteous indignation when the oncologist forgets our name again and refers to us as “Mr. Firmagon.” They watch us try to “stay positive” by brewing kale smoothies and dry-heaving into the sink. They nod supportively when we suggest that the ED might just be a temporary phase, like bell-bottoms or democracy.

And let us not forget the pets, the true emotional support system. Dogs are the silent therapists of the prostate world—always there, always listening, never charging a co-pay. Cats, meanwhile, are immune to your cancer. They have no interest in your symptoms, your supplements, or your soul. They do not care that you’re on hormone therapy. They are hormone therapy, in the form of cold judgment and shredded upholstery. The cat is not here for your recovery. The cat is here for vengeance.

As for the goldfish, his job is mostly observational. He swims in circles while we spiral emotionally, spiritually, and gastrointestinally. He watches. He forgets. He watches again. His attention span is just long enough to remind us: nothing in this house has any memory of your dignity. Least of all you.

I do not offer medical advice. I offer reality, often inconvenient and occasionally dressed in adult diapers. I offer the truth that I dare not speak its name, but I will gladly write a blog about urinary urgency at the speed of light. I offer solidarity, especially when that solidarity involves comparing post-radiation side effects like grizzled veterans of a war nobody asked to fight.

So, no, I’m not a medical expert. But if you want to know what it’s like to stand in your kitchen at 4 a.m. weeping over a yogurt because it’s the only thing your stomach can tolerate, and you’re crying because it’s vanilla and not the banana cream you wanted, then I’m your guy.

Because down here, in the trenches, where side effects breed like rabbits and urologists breed like billing errors, we don’t need more advice. We need more honesty. More gallows humor. And possibly a muzzle for the cat.