Should Cancer Be My Top Priority?

Ron Cooper received a diagnosis of prostate cancer in 2014 and is currently in active surveillance. Catch up on all of Ron's blogs here!

Dear reader, I need your help. As a patient with prostate cancer, I’m trying to prioritize my time and energy, and it has not been easy. There’s just a whole lot going on, and I need some guidance, please. Look at the multiple-choice questionnaire below and tell me which should be my top priority:

A. My wife’s auto accident

B. My son’s hospitalization

C. My cancer biopsy 

D. Our move to a new apartment

E. All of the above

Before selecting one, here’s a little bit of context for you. My prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test results have been on the rise for more than a year, and my doctors suspect that it may be metastatic. Thus, the order for a biopsy procedure.

The order was placed around the same time my wife and I were moving into a new apartment, an exhausting endeavor that claimed most of our waking hours.

Also, our car was rear-ended and totaled, with my wife behind the wheel. Fortunately, she was not hurt, but we had to rely upon a car rental for two weeks and arrange for a U-Haul truck to move our things to the new place. It was a month-long ordeal.

The same day as my wife’s accident, my son fell, cracking several ribs and experiencing a slight puncture to one of his lungs. He was hospitalized overnight and spent more than a week at home recuperating before returning to work. I tried to cheer him up during his convalescence.

In a word, life has been topsy-turvy lately, with plenty of sleepless nights mulling over my upcoming biopsy, and daytimes consumed with check-ins with my son, moving and trying to find a replacement car.

So, dear reader, did you select “C” for my cancer biopsy as the top priority? Metastatic cancer is a huge deal, a life-and-death issue, a quality-of-life issue, a treatment issue. So, “C” would not have been necessarily the wrong choice. Initially, it was my first choice.

But what I have learned from this very busy period in my life is that my cancer is not the center of the universe. People have accidents, get hospitalized and face a whole host of other very human ordeals. 

I am a patient with cancer, but I’m also a husband and father, among other roles. Many other lives intersect with mine, and I strive to be a caring, attentive family man.

It would be so easy for me to obsess about my health, especially when the stakes are so high. But I choose to make my life full of dedication and passion toward those who enrich and fulfill me while trying to keep one step ahead of cancer’s onslaught.

That’s why I chose “E” for “All of the above.”

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