Both of my paternal grandparents died of cancer, as did my dad’s younger sister. My mother—now ninety-six and living on her own, just up the street from our house—has survived both breast and bladder cancer. But right here and now, I want to tell you that this is not a medical memoir. Nor is it, believe you me, an inspirational memoir extolling how, with the help of a brilliant doctor, a breakthrough procedure in radiation therapy, and a supportive family, I licked prostate cancer. Though in fact, with the help of a brilliant doctor, a remarkable new development in medical technology, and a very loving family, I may have done just that.
In the grand old Mosher family tradition of high-spirited hopefulness, combined with what a book critic once called a “lunatic sense of humor,” I immediately began referring to my disorder, and to the treatment that followed, as my personal MacArthur Fellowship. The euphemism struck me as delightfully ghoulish, along the lines of the ancient Greeks referring to their gods’ dreaded and relentless agents of revenge as the “gentle” Furies.
For the record, I will report that I had two gold bands about the size of ordinary staples fired into my ailing organ. The prostate gland is something of a gadabout. This free spirit of the male pelvic region floats around with an altogether cavalier insouciance, sometimes rubbing molecules with other organs that you decidedly do not want bombarded by millions of killer X-rays. The thin gold bands enable the radiation machine to determine the precise location of the peripatetic prostate before each treatment.
Next came forty-four ten-minute sessions at the Norris Cotton Cancer Clinic in Hanover and St. Johnsbury, supervised by Dr. John Marshall, a renowned radiation oncologist who interned under a former student of Marie Curie. Also an award-winning team of nurses and technicians who were as supportive of this talking-out-loud-to-himself storyteller as they were ruthless in their scorched-earth assault on those voracious little night-of-the-living-dead cells that can, if they start to spread, kill a man in a few short months.
Other than some “increased frequency,” by which I mean that, when driving, I had to stop to pee about every eight miles, I coasted through the first trimester of my fellowship period without much apparent difficulty. It occurred to me that my attempt at dark humor actually made good sense. A brush with any potentially fatal illness can be a wake-up call, a reminder—as if we needed one—of our mortality, and an opportunity. In a way, my personal MacArthur was better than a real one. What good would half a million bucks from the magnanimous John D. and Catherine T. outfit do me if I had only three months to spend it before bidding my family and friends a tearful farewell?
In fact, my treatment gave me something infinitely more precious than cash—it gave me time, though the jury was still out on how much. Now, what would I do with it?