HEARD IT THROUGH THE GRIPE-VINE: OUR NEW ABNORMAL
Philip Cu Unjieng
Here’s a cautionary tale for today. Like a number of you out there, before I turned 60, I never had an executive check-up. For me, it was a case of if I’m feeling fine, then why tempt fate? An “if it ain’t broke, why tinker or fix” attitude. It was Issa (Litton) who literally dragged me to my first St. Luke’s BGC Golden Health Screening five years ago; and I joked back then about how they were trying to sugarcoat the process with this Golden adjective. And sure enough, I was given a clean bill of health, with the confirmation that I possessed High Cardiorespiratory Fitness; so while I half-felt that it was a waste of time, if it made her happy, then sure, I’d sign up for the ride and do this annually. And it did become something of a ritual, one of our early January “play dates.”
Fast-forward to the present, and I had my Golden Health in December of 2020. Cardiorespiratory fitness had not changed in the five years, and I’ll credit my getting back to tennis, and the swim or gym time on the days I don’t play. And honestly, I felt fine other than the enlarged prostate issues that had cropped up over the last two years, and were already part of my lifestyle – enlarged, so frequent urination at night; but I was told that’s par for my age.
If there was a blip that set alarm bells ringing, it was that my Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) had shot up from 4.1 in my last screening to 4.79. Given that the score is cause for worry, I was advised to have a prostate biopsy performed. Thank you, Dr. Mark Cellona and to good friend Dr. Steve Lim, for being the urologists there by my side. And so on Friday, February 26, Dr. Steve, with his wife Dr. Joyce as anesthesiologist, did the biopsy.
‘THE SITE OF THE BETRAYAL; WITH MR. PROSTATE AS THE TRAITOR.’
Now let me tell you, for a procedure that’s merely a first step in finding out if there’s anything wrong with you, and isn’t even part of the cure, a prostate biopsy is damn invasive. You’re put to sleep; and a needle that will collect a sample (your prostate is roughly the size of a walnut) is inserted between your penis and anus. See, just saying that already makes me cringe. You’ll pee blood for a couple of days (mine was a delayed reaction), and you’re advised to avoid strenuous exercise for 4-5 days, to be on the side of prudence.
It’s an out-patient procedure, so you’re sent home with that fresh wound between your legs! Plus the regimen of antibiotics you’ll be prescribed was its own form of torture as my taste buds went metallic, and I’d feel nauseous and retch. And so you’re left for a few days waiting for the biopsy results.
The biopsy diagnosis for the right posterior medial of my prostate came out with “Prostatic Adenocarcinoma with Gleason Score 3+3 = 6, involving 50% of one core.” In layman’s terms, I have Stage 1 Prostate Cancer, and the next step was to check if it had spread to my bones before deciding on a treatment. Apparently, chemotherapy doesn’t work very well on prostate cancer, and the options would involve either surgery or radiation. So, I’m booked for the bone Scan, but that hasn’t happened as of this writing.
Why am I relaying all this? Just to remind all of you who have hit 50 to take these bi-annual or yearly (if 60 and above) check-ups seriously. We all talk about medicine and science today, and how it’s extended our life spans. But that’s a general truth, and to make it apply to you, you have to give them the parameters, the data, to work with – and that’s what these executive check-up’s provide.
I have this surreal knack of giving my body parts distinct personalities, and right now, I feel betrayed by Mr. Prostate. I don’t drink (I’m allergic to alcohol), I eat meat but take a lot of veggies and other healthy food, I rarely drink soda, and I control my sugar intake and cholesterol levels. I do smoke, but like five sticks a day, and we’re not talking lung cancer. So there I was, proud of my cardio fitness, when all the time last year, I was being betrayed by this seminal fluid-producing, walnut-sized thingie lodged below my bladder.
And yes, it’s often been mentioned to me since I got the biopsy results that Stage 1 is very curable, and I have the percentages in my favor because it’s been diagnosed early (Thank you, Issa). But intimations of our mortality, how so much of it is a shuffling of the cards and the luck of the draw, still weigh on my mind. Our bodies are essentially machines – and even with all the maintenance, the tuning up, and repairs, they do suffer from the wear and tear of our decades. It’s not like we can trade them in, and acquire a new, better model; at least not yet. So do take care of it, as it’s really the only one you have.