UPDATE - Issue 21 - Spring 2005
Impotence the dreaded side effect
It had been a good day and I came home on a high. My husband, Peter, was working upstairs so I shouted a cheery 'hello'. He shouted back. Two words. 'It's positive.' 'What's positive?' I asked. His head appeared over the stairwell, his face grey and strained. 'The test. It's positive. I've got malignant prostate cancer.'
After more tests and much agonising we made an appointment with a surgeon in Basingstoke who performs key-hole surgery for the condition.
The surgeon showed us a video and explained how he worked. At the same time, we half-heard the surgeon's warnings about possible problems. If the tumour had invaded the nerves, or if they were damaged during the delicate surgery, he would be incontinent and unable to raise an erection. We heard he had a good chance of total recovery. That was what we clung to and prayed for.
During our five-years of marriage, we'd led an active, satisfying love life. We couldn't imagine it not happening. I think we were both in denial. Peter rang a patient based self-help group he found on the Web to see if they could offer advice just in case. The guy manning the phone line was receiving hormone treatment and didn't know what the consequences of radical surgery might be. The weekend before the op we made mad, passionate love. Later, we admitted to one another that we wondered if it might be our last time.
When the five hour long operation was over, the surgeon came to see us and told us that thankfully, the cancer appeared to have been contained inside the gland and he'd managed to preserve those vital little nerves. Peter said he felt he'd been kicked by a horse in the stomach and I was convinced in my relieved ignorance and innocence that the worst was over.
Back home, I tried to keep things normal and went on kissing and cuddling him and showing him affection as I've always done. I wanted him to feel secure and to prove to him that making love was not the be-all and end-all of our life together. To his dismay, he had no sexual desire and Viagra, prescribed on the NHS, had no effect at all.
I was married to a 'stranger'
And it got worse. Suddenly, my formerly loving husband stopped responding to my touch. He no longer put a protective arm round my shoulder. He stopped holding my hand. When I approached him physically, he moved away. 'Go away,' he'd say. 'I'm busy. I'm tired.' I tried to ignore it. He'd had cancer. As far as we knew, he was now cancer free. But, his physical cancer had been replaced by a cancer of coldness, spiralling out of control and demolishing our previously loving relationship. I was married to a stranger. Finally I cracked and started to sob and I couldn't stop. He seemed so insular and I thought he didn't want me any more.
I didn't realise then that not only was Peter a stranger to me. He was a stranger to himself. For all his outward bravado, he felt emasculated, just as some women feel defeminised when they lose their breasts. He'd lost control of this foreign body of his in more ways than one. For the first time in his life, he was unable to get a spontaneous erection. We needed help, we needed to talk to others but we knew of none.
In the end, help came through my job. In April last year, I was invited to a press conference to launch a campaign called Ignorance Isn't Bliss, sponsored by the Prostate Research Campaign UK and initiated by international yachtsman and prostate cancer patient, Kit Hobday. Peter came with me and it was a revelation.
Apart from other journalists and medical professionals, the guests included a range of prostate cancer sufferers, including some famous faces, with their partners. Everyone was talking openly and honestly about this disease, its detection, its cures and its side effects. It was a great relief to come out and find we were not alone.
A year down the line and Peter's condition has improved immeasurably on both counts. He talks to other men about his prostate cancer. Best of all, our love life is back on course. It is more loving and meaningful than ever, and I have finally got my husband back.
He will need to be checked for the next 14 years. That's a small price to pay for a healthy life.
This article by Andrea Kon, appeared in a longer version in Woman's Weekly.