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[page 11]
You can now, also, openly fret and stew about the inadequacy of male plumbing design. Couldn't another place for the prostate been found? But alas, as a friend once commented: "God's
specialty was humanity, not urology." So there's only so much hitching
you can engage in on that subject.
You can, if you wanted to scare the crap out of yourself, contemplate what it would be like if you were diagnosed as having prostate cancer. You can even make believe it won't happen to you. But,
like a junky, you can never get enough of that prostate update fix.
You're forever hoping - even the survivors - to achieve that eternal
high, to read the headline that blisses you out forever, the one that
proclaims: Prostate Cancer Cured!
That my father had prostate problems (I think), and that genetic influences can decide whether prostates survive the long haul or
not, also lay somewhere in my mind. The reason I'm not sure of
whether my father's prostate was on the fritz is because my family,
like so many others, never invoked the dreaded C-word (or the P-word, for that matter) except in whispers and in the most roundabout
way lest the mere mention of the word somehow mark them, dooming them to an early and unimaginably awful death. But somewhere in
his 80's, my father allowed as how he had had something wrong "back
there," and that a doctor had done something "up there," but now
everything was okay. Where exactly "back there" was, and what
was done "up there" and why, I never really learned. But from the
way he waved his hand toward his buttocks when he told me about
his problem, I suspected that he was talking about his prostate. And
while suspicion isn't solid evidence, his hearsay testimony was convincing enough for me; I accepted the fact that genetically, my prostate wouldn't go the 100,000 miles the brochure promised.
I was also made aware of my prostate at each annual physical
I endured, courtesy of my then places of employ. From my early
fifties on, each visit ended with the digital goose and the litany: "It's
getting a little bigger ... normal for your age ... nothing to worry
about." Different doctors each year; same script for a decade.
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