My husband’s cancer was diagnosed three days into the shutdown. Here’s the silver lining
As my surname might imply, I am not an optimist by nature. We have a refrigerator magnet that reads: “An Irishman has an abiding sense of tragedy which sustains him through temporary periods of joy.” (Or at least we did; someone’s probably stolen it by now.)
So you can imagine my surprise when I was recently gifted a small potential silver lining about a topic I previously considered un-silverline-able: my husband’s cancer.
It’s prostate cancer, so not the end of the world, or even our world — caught early, very treatable, low mortality rate, etc., but still, you know, cancer. Cancer that was diagnosed three days into California’s
coronavirus shutdown, which meant he had to decide between surgery and radiation pretty quickly before hospitals were overrun by the then-expected onslaught of COVID-19 cases. It also meant making this decision after a variety of discussions conducted almost exclusively over the telephone. Quietly because we didn’t want our daughters, now home full time, to know about the diagnosis until there was a plan of action.
Richard is an unflappable sort of person, and being diagnosed with a treatable cancer in the middle of a pandemic during which people like him (he is over 65) are dying at above the average rate has the benefit of keeping things right-sized. None of us had the virus, he is retired, we have health insurance, I still have a job. But still, you know, stressful.
In the end, he chose radiation for a variety of reasons, none of them having to do with the coronavirus. But before that treatment can begin, the tumors must be halted in their growth and then shrunk by testosterone suppression via estrogen injection.
It is a bit odd to think of your husband getting shot full of estrogen, and the lame jokes were duly made. (“Maybe you’ll start cooking a bit more,” I suggested brightly.) But given the shutdown, I was a bit concerned. With my son sheltering in his college town, the female to male ratio in our house is 3 to
1. One daughter is 13, the other
20 and I am … well, I am taking hormone therapy for the ghastly effects of menopause, so you do the math.