Most folks would pick the quick demise, but one of the upsides of a progressive cancer diagnosis is you come face-to-face with moral beauty. Getting hit by a bus would have meant no suffering if I died instantly, but it would have robbed me of feeling the gratitude that wells up inside of me when I see how much love is perched on my doorstep like a loyal black lab.
The gifts keep coming, often from unexpected places. There’s Lisa making me ice cubes of miraculous sea moss, Marie Carmen offering me free massages, my sons sending me loving cards out-of-the-blue, and so many of you sending me a surprise email to remind me that it’s best to hear your eulogy BEFORE you die.
Thankfully, all of that love sustained me as I pondered in February 2023 what was ahead of me. I would spend the next 18+ months on hormone depletion therapy which eradicates your libido, sends you into accelerated menopause (which is quite a revelation for a man), creates a protrusion of my belly that I call a growing gut instinct but is painful to see in the mirror, shortens my Johnson by an inch or so during the therapy, and basically cuts my testosterone to nothing which means that I rely heavily on dark chocolate for energy lifts. There were days when an on-coming bus felt more welcoming than this existence.
Then, there was the radical prostatectomy and recovery. I’ve written quite a bit about my intimate relationship with Depends and all of the humiliating experiences I’ve had with pees and poos since my surgery 17 months ago. And, whatever happened to my Erector Set? It’s still down for the count.
The good news is my docs felt that the surgery was successful, so I was really surprised when a couple of months later, I was asked to search for 7-8 weeks in my schedule when I could have 36 successive daily radiation sessions every weekday. What the hell! When am I going to have time for nearly two months of radiation treatments in San Francisco when I have a book and tour coming out in January and our Santa Fe campus opening in the spring. Meanwhile, there were a huge collection of internal changes we needed to make within MEA to get prepared for this growth. There’s no f-ing way I have time for radiation!
Well, that rant lasted a day until I understood just how essential this radiation was and why I couldn’t do it in Baja or Santa Fe. So, I’ll never forget my holidays in 2023 when I did my daily saunter to radiation and, then, usually required an Uber home due to my lack of energy. Being the knucklehead geek that I am, I was able to schedule the 36 sessions such that the very last one, Friday, January 12 was three days before I was to appear on “Good Morning, America,” followed by my book launch the next day, and “The Today Show” a day later. Yowza! How I was able to spend the next two months navigating the book tour (with regular massages and the occasional hot springs visit) while dealing with construction delays and cost overruns, I’ll never know. I do know that being able to make sense of all of this in my daily blog was an essential part of my emotional recovery.
Tomorrow, I’ll tell you more about my current health situation.
-Chip