Dana Jennings

Early each morning I deal myself a daily hand of pills: Wellbutrin (450 milligrams) and Zoloft (200 mg) to ply the capricious oceans of postcancer depression, Provigil (200 mg) to keep exhaustion at bay and a chewable orange baby aspirin (81 mg) as a sweet and modest hedge against a heart attack.

As the pills clatter to the kitchen counter, the ghosts start to gather. They are the shades of the rugged and bitter men who helped shape me as a child — Great-Grandpa Ora and Grandpa Bub, Uncle Lloyd and Great-Uncle Billy, to name a few — and they’re scowling. A real man, you see, isn’t supposed to take pills to ease what ails him. Even aspirin was suspect when I grew up, in rural New Hampshire.

If you were feeling lonesome and blue, or your muscles and joints ached after a week of backbreaking work, beer and whiskey were the elixirs of choice. Pills? No thanks. They were meant for weak and fancy people — like the summer folk from Massachusetts — who couldn’t dig a cellar by hand or pound in a post with a sledgehammer or lug a brace of shingles up a ladder onto the roof of some swaybacked old house.

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Those men were the kind who believed that all of us were portraits of grief — some of us just didn’t know it yet. They sneered at all painkillers, except for whiskey … and hitting.

They got into fistfights for the sheer hell and pain of it, the sting of skinned knuckles reminding them that they were still alive. Some beat their wives and children the way a dog tries to gnaw at the hurt in its paw. And others drove faster than reason itself, seeking out serpentine back roads in their souped-up Mercs and Chevys where the oak trees couldn’t quite get out of the way. Read more…

It has been two years since I learned that I had prostate cancer, and a bit more than a year since I had any treatment for what I eventually learned was an aggressive Stage 3 cancer.

Being from the sticks of New Hampshire, I’m reminded of a woods that has burned. There is still plenty of scorched earth and charred deadfalls, but, more important, the green scrub and optimistic wildflowers of normality are creeping back.

Dana Jennings

I’m in pretty good shape these days. I live from PSA test to PSA test – every three months – and so far, so good. I still get more tired than I would like because my body chemistry is still in ferment from hormone therapy. And, to get an erection, I have to inject my penis with Cavereject, which stimulates blood flow. (It’s not as bad as it sounds. Honest.)

But those are just physical details. I’m more interested in what I’ve learned from my cancer, how it has actually – and unexpectedly — changed me. Cancer is a hard teacher, but a teacher even so.

More than ever, I know that I am blessed in sons and my marriage. That on a cold winter’s night a pint of porter in the company of a good neighbor is a bounty in this uncertain world. Read more…

James Steinberg

We’re all familiar with sentences like this one: Mr. Smith died yesterday after a long battle with cancer. We think we know what it means, but we read it and hear it so often that it carries little weight, bears no meaning. It’s one of the clichés of cancer.

It is easy shorthand. But it says more about the writer or speaker than it does about the deceased. We like to say that people “fight” cancer because we wrestle fearfully with the notion of ever having the disease. We have turned cancer into one of our modern devils.

But after staggering through prostate cancer and its treatment — surgery, radiation and hormone therapy — the words “fight” and “battle” make me cringe and bristle. Read more…

I’ve got a little plastic secret.

I don’t have a colon, and for more than 25 years I’ve worn a pouch on my lower right abdomen to collect waste. I think about the pouch only when I change it or if there’s a problem with it.

My colon was surgically removed in 1984, when I was 27, after it had been ravaged by an acute case of ulcerative colitis, an autoimmune disease. After being chronically ill for more than two years, I was  relieved to have the colon gone. I spent six weeks in the hospital that fall, receiving 27 units of blood as my colon hemorrhaged and my 180-pound frame withered to 122 pounds.

Dana Jennings

The surgery involved removing both the colon and rectum. Then the surgeons brought the end of the ileum — the lowest part of the small intestine — through my abdominal wall to create what is called an external stoma. Each week I fit a wafer of plastic and adhesive around the stoma, then cover it by locking the pouch to the wafer. (The surgery was refined about 20 years ago, and now most patients have an internal pouch.)

Wearing a drainable pouch was a small price to pay to be healthy again. So I accepted it and got on with living in my no-nonsense New Hampshire way. I’ve led a normal and active life since. I was once a serious runner (I ran the 1997 New York City Marathon), coached baseball and soccer, and fathered two sons. (When they were small they used to call the pouch “Daddy’s special bag.”)

When I was told I had stage 3 prostate cancer nearly two years ago, having the pouch did change my treatment options. Because of internal scar tissue from my colon surgery, I wasn’t a good candidate for the robotic, less-invasive surgery commonly used to remove a cancerous prostate. Instead, I had a radical open prostatectomy.

Read more…

Jeffrey Decoster

I’ve trudged through Stage 3 prostate cancer and its treatment in good shape. Nearly two years after learning I had cancer, I’m an active 52-year-old, I exercise regularly, my blood tests are where they need to be and my oncologist wants to see me only twice a year.

But there is one side effect of my treatment that has proved especially stubborn: erectile dysfunction. Read more…

Leif Parsons

In today’s Cases column in Science Times, Dana Jennings writes about the difference between recuperating from an illness and the full recovery that often eludes people with cancer. He writes:

I found out that I had prostate cancer nearly two years ago — it ended up being an unexpectedly aggressive Stage 3 cancer — and in the time since then I’ve learned that there is a big difference between recuperation and recovery.

Recuperation is just physical. The claw of the surgical incision relaxes its grip on your gut. You graduate from catheter to man-diapers to man-pads to, finally, your very own comfy boxers. Energy seeps back into your body after the radiation and the hormone therapy cease.

But recovery means wholeness: mind, body and spirit. And I reached a point last summer and fall when I realized that even though I was back at work, once again juking and stutter-stepping my way through the streets of Manhattan, I hadn’t recovered at all.

Dana Jennings

For the past year, Dana Jennings, a writer with The New York Times, has shared his personal story of prostate cancer, offering wisdom, humor and insights after learning he had a particularly aggressive form of the disease.

Mr. Jennings is on vacation until January, so we thought this would be a good time to look back at some of his most popular columns.

My Brief Life as a Woman: When your testosterone is being throttled, there are bound to be side effects. So, with the help of Lupron, I spent a few months aboard the Good Ship Menopause with all the physical baggage that entails. It’s a trip that most men don’t expect to take.

Life Lessons From the Family Dog: As I face my own profound health issues, it is my dog’s poor health that is piercing me to the heart. I’m dreading that morning when I walk downstairs and … well, those of us who love dogs understand that all dog stories end the same way.

Love in the Time of Prostate Cancer: My wife Deb has taught me that love is in the details. Humid professions of undying love and tear-stained sonnets are all well and good, but they can’t compete with the earthy love of Deb helping me change and drain my catheter pouches each day when I first came home from the hospital.

A Bond Shaped by Illness, but Not Defined by It: Young men expect their fathers to live forever. And fathers never expect to outlive their sons. But my son Owen and I both understand now that there are no sure bets in this life.

Time Is a Trickster When Cancer Runs the Clock: Cancer insists on its own time. If you try to defy it, it can break you, physically and spiritually.

With a Buzz Cut, I Can Take On Anything: My prostate cancer and its treatment have transformed me — in body and spirit — and the buzz cut has helped me cope with those changes.

To read all of his columns, go to “Prostate Cancer Journal: One Man’s Story.”

In Science Times today, Dana Jennings writes that cancer has changed how he spends his personal time.

More than ever these days, I want to shrink the world to the couple of rooms in my house where I’m most comfortable. I’ve been declining requests for my time, and the social whirl is less compelling than it ever was. To me, a perfect evening often means stretching out in the den and vanishing into a good novel or compact disc. … I want to nest. I’m doing well physically — my blood tests couldn’t be better, and I regularly take five-mile walks — but my spirit is still convalescing. I crave homely days built around writing, reading and time spent with family and friends.

To learn more, read the full Cases column, “At Home in Solitude as a Spirit Recovers,” and then please join the discussion below. Did cancer or another illness change how you want to spend your time?