‘My cancer has ushered in a new me that I’m still learning to discover, love’

PART 4

That helps a lot. The bright sunny blue day of my surgery arrives and I am feeling calm and free and present. Surgery is a kind of therapy too. It certainly concentrates one’s mind on being present. Nothing else matters. The white lights, the coated staff, the clinical passageways and lifts and wards. They all are magnified in their presence by their unfamiliarity. That certainly concentrates the mind. You roll with the process. Numberless and nameless. Not caring nor expectant. Resolved to a simple state of just being without hope or fear. Truly living with the present.

I’m feeling almost like an Alice in Wonderland when I walk into the theatre and see the banks of computers, the six huge octopus-like arms of the DaVinci machine, the computer console for the surgeon. My eyes are on stalks. I want to discuss design, process, technical specifications, skills, competence, teamwork. Like I am a unionist again on a plant tour of some new age Elon Musk-imagined electronic vehicle plant.

But there is no time for that. All I can think of is that it’s so wonderfully technologically intensive and that I hope all of humanity one day can access this technology and skill. Theatre work beckons and intervenes. About me is a team of surgery soldiers, each with his own set of commands, working in unison. I place myself at their command. Happily and willingly so.

The anaesthetist says I will feel a small prick in my lower back as I sit upright on what feels like a work bench of sorts. I scarcely feel the prick when a warm numbing of my lower back and legs and feet sets in. I lie down and am totally paralysed as the epidural takes effect. I cannot move my lower half and yet I am still totally conscious. Didn’t expect that. It feels glorious. An out-of-body experience. Literally. I look up at the lights as I hear the anaesthetist saying that he will now insert the “Michael Jackson juice” into my outstretched arm.

Bring it on I think and then the blackness sets in for two hours until I emerge to the sounds of voices. I have no idea where I am. My body is in spasm and shakes uncontrollably. It’s very, very scary. I feel myself calling for help but I cannot hear my voice. And no-one seems to be listening anyway. I feel another prick, this time into the upper arm. Gradually the shaking subsides and a calmness sets in. I am saddled and strapped to a hospital bed.

I have oxygen pipes up my nostrils, drips hanging from both arms, a drainage pipe on my left side, a catheter in my penis and a kind of cushion that is wrapped around each of my ankles and is squeezing me methodically and systematically. I cannot move. I dare not move. I am being wheeled back to the intensive care ward. And I know for certain my recovery journey has just begun. And that thought keeps me hopeful, keeps me settled.

I spend three nights in hospital and I am grateful for every night. Hospitals are surrounded by carers and I feel in need of a lot of care. And I am fortunate to have my partner carer by my side as I head back to my doctor daughter’s home in Johannesburg for a week, before returning to have my stitches and catheter removed, the last step in the clinical process. I feel liberated walking out of doctors’ rooms without a catheter and with a pad like nappy between my legs. Grateful for small things. I’m ready for my new life. Or so I like to think.

I return to the bush with six neat holes in my lower belly and a pad in my crotch. Day after day I learn to change pads and shower and walk slowly. It’s a very gradual recuperation process as my body finds itself again. Everyone’s body has their own songlines. Mine sings softly and gently and slowly. Each day better than the last. I take care to rest frequently. I've never been one to stretch the physical boundaries. Weeks pass in a routine of walk and sleep and eat and sleep and walk again.

My strength is coming back inch by inch. I am taking Cialis daily to pump blood into what remains of my penis. I have bought a penis pump to blood me up now and then. I can scarcely look at that now useless-feeling appendage between my legs. There is no sign of movement for weeks. But the words of my physiotherapist ring relentlessly in my ears: “Do your Kegels and use it or lose it.” So, we try.

My partner is beyond amazing in her readiness to work with me to find new sexual arousal. We try new things. We get shocked and overjoyed when I have my first orgasm, even though it's half of what it used to be. And even though it comes with leaking urine. Still, it comes. We learn that there are wet ways and dry ways to get to orgasms. And we win some and lose some. It’s a journey of discovery. A journey made better by trial and error and a lightness of living and being.  

At six weeks I get PSA tested again. It’s a big day and we wait anxiously for the result. Eventually it comes with a call while we are on the road to a nursery on the Swaziland border. I cannot believe my ears when I hear my PSA reading and ask the caller to repeat herself three times over. “Zero point zero three. Undetectable” she says. With each repeat we screech with excitement. It's like I am getting baptised into a new life.

A second chance. We hug and kiss and start singing those magic numbers together as we head for the nursery. It’s a seminal moment that seems to affirm and confirm everything we have been through. Three months later we PSA test again. Same score. Flatlining. Nothing could be better. We have set a course. The task at hand is to retain the course for every test in each forthcoming three-month cycle for the next two years, then six monthly for a further three years, to be categorised as clinically cancer-free. A long road ahead.

That’s the clinical front office story. The back office one is way deeper and more colourful. Because the physical story is only the driver to an emotional and intellectual, revolutionary story. My cancer has ushered in a new me. A new me that I am still learning to discover and to cherish and to love. It's early days but some distinct features of the new me are starting to emerge. And they are all welcomed, like the first buds of spring. I have been compelled to confront the source of male sexual ego and let go of penetration, of orgasm, of thumping bodies as some apex summit of love making.

To know that lovemaking and being in love is an everyday act of ongoing intimacy above and beyond physicality, though not excluding the touch, scent, motion of arousal and orgasm itself. That narrow pursuit of male initiated, orgasmic driven penetrative sex is gone, just like my erection. In its place a new field of partnership and sharing and intimate play that stands tall between me and my love. And it's not just in play, or in lovemaking, that the new me finds its comfort zone.

It’s in a deeper appreciation of me as a father and grandfather, in a new-felt desire for care of health and home and self. A deeper conviction that, as a sixty-something prostate cancer survivor, there is much, much more I want to give to the world. Understanding and appreciating that I am an insignificant drop in the ocean of all living species. But a drop nonetheless, capable of listening and learning and servicing the social and environmental needs of our planet wherever I am, whenever I can. Life is so beautiful. It has a new glow and a new energy. I live in it.

Dawn to dusk. I live in the present, consciously, day by day. Each step I take now is more considered, with more meaning, more depth and more love for others than ever before. Telling this story is part of creating that new and significant love for life, in the unbridled hope that others too may read this and thrive and survive the cancer curse.

• This is the last story in a new feature called First Person. If you have written a personal story and you want to share it email karrasa@arena.africa

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