UPDATE - Issue 06 - September 2000
Orchidectomy
John Whale talks about his experience of this treatment for advanced prostate cancer
Orchidectomy: the removal of the testicles (which ancient Greek gardeners thought an orchid bulb resembled). It happened to me in 1994 as treatment, plus a daily pill, for a prostate cancer that had gone too far. Life since then has been a lot better than I expected.
A lot longer, too. Mean overall survival time said the expert booklet given to me, was about three years. I've had six. That says little, perhaps to others in the same case: to keep the figure true, there must be people who draw an allowance a good deal meaner than three. More telling than length, though, is quality.
Many good things in life persist. You can still take your chosen exercise: I can walk half a dozen miles at a stretch or swim in a cool sea for half an hour. Your mental powers hold up: I read no less attentively than I did, write no worse. Your tastes don't change; nor does your voice. You feel the same person as before. Above all if you are well married you can still love your wife as you ought.
There are of course, before I take that up, things that do change. You can put mind or body to serious use for less long at a time than before, and you need an afternoon sleep. That doesn't go with full time work; I left mine as soon as I might after the operation.
You are more readily moved. That has its good side; you respond more fully to music, say, or pictures. But you are also more often irritated. That might follow, I suppose, from plain old age; as might the pessimism that can visit you when you're tired.
Your body changes. The hair disappears from your chest, your arms, your legs. You grow breasts; not big ones, but big enough to bounce tiresomely if you run. You're troubled by hot flushes in the top part of your body; perhaps four in the latter part of every day, each lasting a couple of minutes (wear a jacket or cardigan instead of a jersey and you can peel quicker). And you can get only half way to an erection, and even that hurts.
Yet that turns out to matter less than you might suppose. What has stirred you in the past will continue to stir you. You still want to kiss, to caress. Love is not made only with the body; and if with the body then with hands as well as other parts. You are denied climactic physical joy yourself; but you can bestow it.
There is natural selfish disappointment in that, certainly. To take as much pleasure in giving as you would have done in getting calls for a better character than most of us men possess. But pleasure of a kind is still there to be taken.