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203 Yoakum Parkway


Alexandria, VA 22304

Double Whammy
A Four Month Journey Through Two Cancers
by Ernest Wittenberg

Friday, March 27, 1998


This was the day that Dr. Banfield, after 22 years of monitoring my
plumbing,.finally had to tell me that I had cancer. It couldn't have
been easy for him either.
He started working with me, make that on me, in 1976 when I
showed up in his waiting room because I was peeing bright red blood
in great streams. He rammed a cystoscope through my urethra to
shine a light on the depths of my bladder and identified a bleeding
tumor in its wall. Had to be removed immediately, he said, reaching
for the phone to call George Washington Hospital admissions. But I
had other priorities.
"Sorry, doctor!," I said. "I need two weeks before I can go to the
hospital."

He put down the phone. "But you're bleeding internally from a


growth that might be cancerous."
"I can't help it. Llesl and I are going to Brazil next week. I'm going
to be the keynote speaker at the national convention of the Brazil
Public Relations Association and it's a once in a lifetime opportunity.
I'm not going to cancel." Banfield, a former Navy flight surgeon, said
it was risky to make the trip, but if it was that important to me and I
wanted to take a chance he was willing to to go along with me.
He outfitted us with what amounted to a mobile clinic: antibiotics,
catheters in case one of the huge clots that were now appearing in
my urine blocked the flow, all kinds of gauze pads, syringes and
other gear. He enjoyed picturing us being nabbed at the Rio airport
for smuggling drugs and the next day's headline in the Rio papers
about the triumphant Brazilian customs officers busting this high
class international drug ring. He crossed his fingers and set up the
operation for the day after we returned from Brazil,where I never
stopped bleeding but rode a very successful presentation about how
to deal with Congress (their government had just been liberated after
many years of dictatorship and representative government was
taking its first steps) into a meteoric rise in our business.. First, it
was reproduced in Current Speeches and then it formed the basis for
How to Win in Washington, the book about lobbying that Liesl and I

wrote which was adopted as a text at Harvard's John F. Kennedy


School of Government and other universities.

When he finally got me pinned to an operating table, Dr. Banfield


plucked the growth from my bladder without an abdominal incision.
And, hallelujah, the lab declared it benign. After that he always
spoke in awe about my mega-sized bladder, which has an extra
compartment something like a cow's stomach, and can never be
emptied. properly. Biggest bladder I ever saw, he often tells me
during our twice a year checkups, and I think he uses it for small
talk like a Guiness record with his other patients. He has relayed the

story of my bloody trail to South America to a whole generation of


high level government officials who are and have been his patients.
But this time it wasn't the bladder and there were no dramatic
symptoms. He found a growth on my prostate using standard tests
during a routine checkup. My PSA (Prostate Specific Antigen), the
universal prostate cancer indicator, showed a sudden jump from two
to seven in six months. Not high enough to wish I had updated my
will before I came, but enough of a bump for a urologist to

investigate. further. So he scheduled an ultrasound procedure on my


prostate for last Monday. Up to now it has been a model gland,
staying walnut sized and going about its sex functions without any
perceptible trouble. Up to now! The doctor guided a rectal insert
attached by a cable to a computer screen. Images of all aspects of
the prostate appeared on the screen during the tour. When Dr.
Banfield found an area worth exploring further, a click told the
machine to collect biopsies for laboratory study. Ten samples were
taken.

Right after the procedure was finished he reviewed the pictures with
Liesl and me. Only one area showed an abnormality. A growth
looking like a piccolo Vesuvius was sitting ominously on the front of
the prostate. Dr. Banfield said a growth in this location was not a
common finding, but not to worry. It might be nothing at all,
possibly an infection, for example, and even if it were cancerous,
we'd be getting it so early that treatment was a piece of cake.
Prostate cancers come graded one to 10 on a Gleason scale. A 10 is an
automatic death sentence and a nine means it has a hand on your
shoulder. Three hundred thousand new cases come on line every
year in the U.S. and every male is guaranteed to get it if he lives to
90 and is lucky enough to have avoided it earlier. In mortality,
prostate cancer is second only to lung cancer as the highest cause of
cancer death in American men. 41,000 men died from it in 1996.
Dr. Banfield took my call about the results of the biopsies at 11. It
went like this:
"How are you, Mr. Wittenberg?"
"That depends on what you're going to tell me."
"Mr. Wittenberg, one of the biopsies is cancerous."

"Then I feel shitty."

And, of course, I did. This was the end of the world for me. I'm
dying. I'm going to be an invalid for the rest of my life. I've got to
watch every step. How can this be? I don't have a single symptom.
Maybe they mixed up the biopsies at the hospital and right now
someone in the Washington, D.C. area is celebrating his freedom from
cancer based on my tissues. Is the estate in order? Is Llesl
prepared? I'm certainly not. She was sitting at the dining room
table. I flashed her a "Thumbs Down" and an exaggerated sour face
to go with it. When I hung up the phone she hugged me tightly and
said: "So what? We're tough. We'll lick it." That's my mate of
almost 53 years speaking; my advisor, my partner, my full-time
optimist. So she must know. That started my graph upward. How
are we going to do that? We need more information about my tumor
and cancer in general. When we went to bed my mind was deep in
organizing my research project and I was thinking very seriously
about living.
That volcano turned out to be a Gleason 8, distinctively aggressive.
No small potatoes. A hit, a very palpable hitf Dr. Banfield said the
next step was to take a bone scan and a pelvic catscan as soon as
possible to see if it had spread to any other parts of the body. If the
tumor was still encapsulated in the prostate we were in clover, so to
speak. It would be treatable, probably without further complications.
" How about Friday?" he asked.

"I've got a tennis date, but I'll cancel it."


"That's exactly what I don't want you to do. I want you to go on with
your life just as you have been doing. We'll make it on Monday at
Sibley Hospital."
Now cancer is something to think about and I haven't been thinking
about anything else since. At my age, 77, I had been aware intellectually for some time that one day I am going to die. But at this
moment it hit me that death is not an intellectual issue but could be
right there waiting in my guts, ready to strike. Even on D+2, on an
LST headed to Omaha Beach I was never as conscious of the fragility
of life as I am now. And now, whom do I have to tell , or, better yet,
who has the need to know about my cancer? I admit to a certain
geezer's pride at being admired for being great shape as a
septuagenarian jock. And the minute you tell your tennis partners,
your friends and business associates--even in the current climate of
constant news stories about cancer research and cures galore-- you
are a person marked for pity and an early demise. Keep those damn
pallbearers away! So, Liesl and I agreed that we were only obliged
to tell our sons, Peter and Dan. Period. But maybe not even them
right away. Wait a couple of days until the panic settles down and
we get some better idea of the outlook.
Saturday, March 28

I had a memoryfest today reading The New York Times obituary on


Martha Gellhom, the writer. She died in her eighties. I knew her in
England during the war when she was a very attractive and talented
woman in her prime. Liesl suspects I never quite got over her. I did,
but it wasn't easy to forget this very bright and very glamorous war
correspondent who was plunked into my life by Hitler. The Army
appointed me to escort her to the Normandy invasion staging areas
and facilitate her reporting. We spent two days working together on
news about the coming Normandy invasion. The days were June S
and June 6, 1944 and we were interviewing soldiers on LSTs when
the first landings were made. She was a correspondent for Collier's
Magazine but was marked for eternity to be better known as one of
Ernest Heming-way's former wives regardless of what she did.
I still wonder how the Army managed to steer me to my ideal
occupation. After all, I had gotten to this point in my life after a
Jersey City childhood, four years at NYU and two and a half years as
a medical student in Boston. I dropped out of med school where I
thought I was wasting my time to join the Army as a private, pissing
away my widowed mother's dreams and hard won financing from
the profits of her small dress shop on Jackson Avenue. I was
promptly assigned right back into medicine at a general hospital in
England. I rose rapidly to the exalted rank of corporal, along with
Napoleon and Hitler, but my field pack did not include a field
marshal's baton. Just a notebook and pencil. Those two utensils can
get you anywhere.

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About two weeks before D-Day I was yanked up to London to join a
new public relations unit organized by a Major Gordon Berger to
escort the American war correspondents to the staging areas and also
provide our own stories. We wore shoulder patches reading
"Correspondent, U.S. Army." We trained for four days in a mock
newsroom and then were assigned coverage areas along the Channel
coast.
I drew the job of escorting Gellhom and we got on fine .. She called
me Witty and she referred to her ex as Hemingstein. She described
him sitting in a director's chair with a portable typewriter on his
sizeable belly knocking out 1,000 words without looking up .
.She was intrepid and she had push. She had a knack for putting
soldiers at ease and getting them to talk. I think each of them were
hoping she would fall madly in love with them and insist on making
love before they went into battle. She certainly improved the
quality of my fantasies too but I pegged her as miles above my
station. Still, to have made it with one of Papa's brides, hmmmm. We
were interviewing soldiers aboard an LST about to leave for Omaha
Beach with tanks and crews when she dropped a rock. She told me
she'd like to stay on board, even without credentials authorized for
France. I could have stopped her. I blew it by letting her go and I
soon decided that the landings couldn't take place without me either
and shipped on another LST with a unit of the 2nd Armored Division.

A few miles out of the harbor, while I was still thinking about
Gellhorn truly and well, an eagle colonel spotted me as the only
soldier on board out of battle gear. He noted that my orders limited
me to the near shore. He could have caused me great woe, but he
didn't. He solved the problem by committing me to a round
trip."You're not to get off this vessel when we land! Understand?
You're a brave man and I'd like to take you with me, but you're
going back."
There was no longer any war at Omaha when I got there. Only two
days after the invasion it was an orderly harbor for a heavy traffic in
landing craft. The skies were quiet and the German guns on the cliffs
were a graveyard. The 2nd Armored was replaced for the return trip
with a boatload of very unfrightened 13 to 16-year-old German
prisoners who came on board carrying suitcases that looked as if
they were expecting a vacation in England rather than a trip to a
prison camp. I made contact with a couple of them in primitive
Yiddish to their German. It didn't work very well. In London, Major
Berger was properly heated and threatened me with a court martial
for desertion. For desertion to the battlefield? Then he suddenly
switched gears and sounding like Walter Burns, the managing editor
in "The Front Page" he barked: "Now sit down and write your story

and put it on the wire!" He later wrote me a commendation and sent


it to my commanding officer for my file. Note: Martha Gellhorn
rated a half-page obit in The Times. Lots about Hemingstein. Not a
word about Witty.

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I had a good war and I brought home a bride. I picked Liesl up in a
serviceman's club in London in April, 1945, five weeks before VE
Day and two days after President Roosevelt died She was alone in the
library of the Balfour Club, a block from the BBC studios off Oxford
Circus, studying for a nursing exam. Her absolutely radiant smile as I
came in would have made a mute garrulous and I wish I could say
that my pickup line was at least better than the all-time cliche "Do
you come here often?" But it was worse: "Big book for a small girl." It
will never fly in Bartlett's Quotations. Even now I'd like to rewrite it.

I got off to a good start because I could quiz her like a professor
about pneumonia, the subject of her exam. We went for a walk in
blacked-out Westminster and sat near the lions in Trafalgar Square
wondering if the feisty Admiral Nelson up there on that column ever
thought about punching an idiot peer on another plinth that he could
surely see and disdain from that height. That one celebrated the
faltering Prince who inspired the celebrated song that starts "the
king's horses, the king's men marched up and down and they
marched back again, the king's horses and the king's men" At the
end of the evening she let me take her as far as the Liverpool Street
Underground, from where she had to walk in the blackout through
the badly bombed out East End to St. Leonard's Hospital. A rat
brushed against the back of her legs as we kissed with the promise
to meet the next day, Sunday, at noon at Marble Arch for lunch.
Terminally smitten, I hated to go back to my unit, the 67th General
Hospital, after our Sunday date. I was stationed about 150 miles west
of London, in Taunton, Somerset. She wouldn't take my address when

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we parted, saying that she wouldn't need it. She could get it off the
envelope on my first letter. That hooked me even further. But she
gave me hers and we didn't miss one day's mail. Then we spent a
weekend at the English Channel resort of Bournemouth in May,
where I proposed and when she appeared for our wedding at the
beginning of the August Bank Holiday she was pregnant. A packet of
condoms fell out of my raincoat pocket as I was getting into the taxi
taking us to the Shoreditch registry office near St. Leonard's for the
wedding .. "You're a little late," she said with a smile, telling me for
the first time about her new condition.
We honeymooned at Torquay for a week with a final night in London
at the superposh Brown's Hotel, which I could never have afforded
on a corporal's pay, but the bride knew the night clerk who was a
dropout from St. Leonard's.

She put us up in a vast suite with a

sitting room, two baths, and two bedrooms in addition to two


bedrooms for our servants. We later learned that it was also the
honeymoon site of Franklin and Eleanor, who were equally
impressed. Franklin described the premises as posh in a letter sent
from London to his mother, Sara Roosevelt. When we were ready to
leave the next morning the manager of Brown's came to say goodbye
in traditional striped trousers and morning coat as if we were the
duke and duchess being accomodated while their London town house
was being reopened. He carried our hotel bill on a silver tray. Four
pounds! Two guineas! It was less than the cost of a room at a
Piccadilly fleabag. He smiled. "I hope you will be very happy."

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After VE Day and while I was still a soldier waiting for enough points
to get home, the Anny found me a job on the editorial staff of the
Kentish Mercury, the big weekly covering Greenwich, Woolwich, and
environs. I wrote a Page One column titled "An American Looks at
Southeast London" which drew a lot of mail from the locals and I
enjoyed lunch every Friday with the editor at a different free house
to celebrate publication day. Free house pubs stocked a variety of
beers unlike most of the pubs in England which were owned by
breweries and specialized in one brand name. The editor, Mr.
Bawden, always wore striped trousers for the important occasion of
greeting the new edition of the Mercury and imbibing Bass ale on
tap. Lunch never went past 3:30 p.m. Another edition coming out
next week, you know. Bawden was a great admirer of dauntless
American journalism, probably as practiced in the movies, and
considered me a great catch for his paper. I was living in Army
billets on Russell Square, so Liesl and I were together in the
ambulance with the siren screaming when the pregnancy miscarried
at 4 1/2 months. There were five more at exactly the same time
before we came up with a genuine baby in 1955.
The Army shipped her home to me on Easter Sunday 1946 aboard
the Queen Mary, which was carrying 5 ,000 other war brides who
were arriving with and without offspring. Heading up the Hudson
the bride ship passed banner after banner still hanging from New
York's greeting to the returning troops: "Welcome Victors!" The
welcoming committee included my resilient mother who seemed
able to forgive me for anything including the additional blow of

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bringing home a poor girl from the old country instead of the
Chicago movie house heiress I had been dating as I left for overseas.
My only sibling, an older sister named Hazel, and my uncle, Irving
Robinson, our family's authentic nogoodnik with a San Quentin con
record to prove it, were also at the pier. Irving's family feeling
overflowed for the occasion. He chauffeured us in his revered 1941
Cadillac, which he thought anointed him with unmistakable class,
and when he offered to buy Liesl a new wardrobe as an arrival gift
we thought he was the most generous man in New York. The next
day he took her to a department store and paid for the three dresses
she selected with a rubber check. My mother, accustomed to picking
up the pieces left behind by her con man younger brother, made it

good
Liesl and my mom outdid each other being accomodating. No
arguments. No problems. But the moment our reunion week at a
New York hotel ended, Liesl hustled down to lower Broadway with
the New York Times want ads and grabbed an office job in the Wall
Street area. Handy girl. She could type and take shorthand. I had
come back in February and enrolled in Uncle Sam's generous
readjustment program, the 52/20 Club--twenty bucks a week for a
year to help find my way back to civilian life. That was going to take
some doing. I had decided on a newspaper career but journalism jobs
in New York were hard to find. Luckily, also finding his way back at
this time was my good friend Bert Jacobson, who had an apartment
on MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village and, like me, a working
wife. Bert had wound up as an Air Force captain.

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From the moment he arrived for his senior year at Henry Snyder
High School in Jersey City, Bert became a major influence on my life.
This red headed boy-man added all kinds of new dimensions to a
narrowly lived Jersey City childhood. He inhaled all kinds of books.
He had been a cover-to-cover reader of The New Yorker since he
was 10. He was urbane and funny. He wore Levis, then an absolute
sign of non-conformity. He smoked a lot, dangling a cigaret from his
lower lip like Bogart. He drank beer and Scotch. He could recite
long Kipling poems line for line and knew all the words to dozens of
filthy songs. Both his parents had been born in the U.S., were
college-trained and maintained friendships with major figures in the
art and book worlds. They moved to Jersey City because Joe had
taken the top executive job at the Holland Laundry, the largest
cleaning operation in Hudson County. Bert's mother, Woodsie, owned
and operated the What Not Shop, an antique store on West 8th Street
in the Village. On top of all that the Jacobsons bought a farm near
Flemington, N.J., and I had the run of it an entire summer as an
unpaid hand helping with the cedar shingling of the barn, which had
become a "by appointment" antique shop. Just me and Bert and his
delightful but foul farting 10-year-old airdale named Rex., country
boys from Jersey City in a Chevvie pick up! Bert was not just an
influence; he was a continuous festival entering my life.
Jake and I had a wonderful time readjusting in Village bars and New
York museums, only occasionally letting such crass subjects as our
coming careers interfere with the charms of urban life, as she is

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lived. Cavalierly, he insisted on paying larger than an equal share of
the bar bills because "My wife makes infinitely more than your wife,

."
The festival was heading for its last days, though, because it didn't
work very well as a foursome. When we got together after the
women finished work, the Jacobsons promptly headed for the booze.
While Llesl was certainly no Carrie Nation, she rarely drank as much
as a glass of dinner wine in those days and here she had to cope with
a liquor-centric couple who struck her as stick characters in a badly
cast Noel Coward play. She also thought that Naomi played Bacall a
bit too shallowly. Meanwhile, though, Naomi was not particularly
inspired by Llesl either. The atmosphere was never anything but
pleasant all the way around, but Bert and I were grasping the idea
that new post-war loyalties were in play and our dates got less and
less frequent.
Liesl and I were now consolidating on the idea that we should get
our start away from the metropolitan area. See what was going on a
little further west of the Hudson. There were jobs advertised in
Editor & Publisher for reporters,. but mostly you'd have to settle in
towns like Hattiesburg and Greenville, Mississippi. One week an ad
for a spot in Erie, Pennsylvania caught my eye. We found that Erie
was a city of 100,000 right on Lake Erie and a standard four letter
crossword puzzle answer to the clue: "Pennsylvania's Only Port." For
me as a starting reporter the city had the unusual feature of
competing afternoon newspapers aiming for each other's gonads.
Sounded good and I promptly pounded out a 500 word application

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letter. The return letter offering me the job began Dear Ernie (for
Pyle).
How did my mother take the news of the coming move? With a
burning hot glass of tea and two lumps of sugar. Philosophically,
shall we say?

A railroad strike was under way so we left by

Greyhound in July to begin to conquer our brave new world


Monday, March 30

Got up at 12:30 a.m. and after surfing the TV to no avail surfed the
web instead for Prostate Cancer. Let me tell you, this must be the
talkingest disease of all time. There are a couple of thousand
websites that can be visited--home pages and endless links to
urologists and hospitals, up to and including Johns Hopkins and the
Mayo Clinic, all of them looking for trade in this vast prostate
market. There are scientific articles, on line Qf,rA for patients,
support groups all over the country, and a doctor who bills himself
as "Ask Arthur." And boy do they ask him! The questions, posed
mostly by frightened wives and patients, sound as if they're coming
from diplomates of the board in urology. Here's one: "Dear Arthur:
Upon reviewing the pathology report on my biopsy I found the
following: "Prostate biopsy left lobe:fibromuscular and glandular
hyperplasia and focus of atypical glands. Prostate biopsy right lobe:

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well to moderately differentiated adenocarcinoma grade 1-11 and
gleason's score (2 + 3). Am I correct in assuming that, although
"atypical" indicates non-normal cells, no cancer was found in the left
lobe in the area of the biopsy? " On another web site you can learn
all about Us-Too, the national prostate cancer support group with
local branches everywhere. On still another comes feedback from
the field, a very lively chat group called the Seed Pods. Here mavens
and novices gather and post the newest information, opinions,
rumors, nasty comments about professional help and fine points
about the technical side of seeding. A Gleason rating gets you past
the door. Apparently when you have prostate cancer, it's like being
one of Sondheim's Jets. "You're never disconnected; you're never
alone when company's expected."
Reading about an hour's worth of this trove, I managed to lessen my
ex:pectations--and, of course, my jumpiness-- about what is about to
happen to me. I didn't eliminate any of the possible hazards to my
future but they fell into perspective a little better. First, that
classification of 8 on the Gleason scale is rated as an "aggressive"
cancer that can invade the pelvis and travel through the body via the
lymph nodes. This is obviously not to be desired, but from what I
comprehend on the web this process can go on for a decade or more
without killing the patient. It's a very slow process. Let's see. I'll be
78 in July and within the next 10 years I'll be a certified candidate
for attrition even without prostate cancer. So the likelihood of death
from prostate cancer sounds remote. There are however, dreadful
possibilities sometime in the future, like metastases causing

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hallucination by attacking the brain and causing exhaustion by
attacking the bones.
At least, because of my great age--according to Dr. Banfield--there
will be no radical surgery. Translation: I will keep my prostate,

flawed though it is at the moment. And I am happy to report that I


will also keep my testicles. Removing them was once medicine's

only option to alleviate advanced prostate cancer. It's still in the


urologist's kit for extreme cases. The operation is called an
orchiectomy, a word which makes me queasy just to write it. The
object is to deprive the tumor of its equivalent of a wild, drunken
night on the town. The villain is testosterone, the male hormone
produced in the testicles, which inflames the tumor and encourages it
to move around the body. The common surgery today is a radical
prostatectomy which gets right to the heart of the problem by
removing the tumor along with the prostate. Either of these
operations could mean the end of sex forever and ever, but
presumably this will not be a problem for most of us senior guys.
We can go right on screwing like our patron saint, Senator Strom
Thurmond of South Carolina, now 95 and of whom it was said by one
of his Senate colleagues, John Tower, saluting him on a birthday:
"When Strom dies they're going to have to beat his cock to death
with a stick." Sometimes it pays to be an old man. And Arthur says,
having been asked, that radiation seeding, which works if the cancer
stays exclusively in its capsule in the prostate, has very few side
effects. It also does not mess with sex as it kills the cancer. There
are other treatment possibilities. One is called external beam

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radiation. Another, called hormonal, uses testosterone inhibiting
drugs to simply put the tumor on hold. The stalemate can go on
indefinitely. There are experimental treatments in use and there are
more in the pipeline but those are the biggies.
Question I must Ask Arthur or someone else one day: Who was or is
Gleason? I'm sure he was the doctor who graded the tumors but
shouldn't we know a little about him and how he put it together?
From the little I know about it now the Gleason Scale is widely
accepted and the one unifying definition in the diagnosis and
treatment of prostate cancer.

Tuesday, March 31
Nixon had a cancer on his presidency, according to John Dean, and
mine is on the prostate. Mine may be life threatening. His just
threatened his livelihood. I've been living with this dreadful fact for
about 72 hours now and trying out all kinds of approaches to keep
from scaring the pis out of myself, which, considering my bladder, is
hard enough to do without any external stimuli. So let's make stand
up jokes for Liesl. Phone in question for Car Talk on National Public
Radio: "What kind of trade-in allowance can I get on a Gleason 8?"
How about civil rights posters at the courthouse: "Free the Gleason
8."

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A number 8 is almost as close as you can get to the fatal 10 and I'd
just as soon skip the honor. Besides how long has the thing been
there and has it shipped others just like it into my bones and lymph
nodes to sap my strength and kill me slowly, drip by drip.

Staying

with the presidential theme, at night I frighten myself by developing


a conspiracy theory. This thing, my theory goes when my
imagination really gets going, has been responsible for my recent
illness--the painful infection of my parotid gland and right ear.
Metastasized to my jaw, this crazy idea goes, and now that the
infection is gone (Liesl says how the hell do I know it's gone? It's
gone, it's gone! Trust me) it's working on my right mandible joint,
making it hard to chew and delivering bearable pain. I know this is
mad, mad, hysterical mad, but it's my cancer and I can paint it as
black as I like.
Since we are dealing with the unknown, these pictures being taken
on Wednesday have the potential of delivering some very bad news.
Sibley's nuclear medicine department is going to do a bone scan,
checking one of the favorite known landing places in the body for
prostate cancer metastases. Two hours before the scan I take a
gruesome white cocktail that will make me glow. It will tell those
who can read the scans if there are metastases and where they are.
I sure as hell don't want to hear about that. It would probably mean
the full megillah of debilitating treatments with body weakness and
maybe a countdown for dear old Em, who thought this sort of thing
only happened to other people. I once considered that I might die. It

21
was during a very fast incline in the cross-country tracks of a
beautiful trail on the Von Trapp ski premises in Vermont. My last
words would have been: "Edelweiss, Edelweiss."
On reviewing what I wrote just now, it sounds as if I am in a state of
panic, which I'm not. Liesl and I go about our days like always, not
skipping anything, and I don't bring up the subject of my curse more
than once an hour. She is cheerful as ever and a great buddy. The
secret of her winning ways is a combo: that charming Viennese
accent, a beguiling smile, and an attentive ear that makes her the
perfect audience with a knack of listening intently, soothingly, or
intelligently to even the biggest bores. Her ripostes are like classic
Schnitzler and the smile salves the hurt. She flashes that smile at
people she passes on the street and gets even the grumpiest to smile
back. When I took her to my SOth anniversary reunion at NYU
three people said they remembered not me but her from our college
days. To do that they would have to have been in Vienna in 1937,
rather than in Washington Square. She left for England in November,
1938, as a refugee after the Anschluss with her younger sister
aboard a Quaker children's transport.
She tried to comfort me with a list of all the people we know who
have come up on top or at least have held off advancing cancer for a
long period of time. At the top of her list--and Danny's--is Walter
Hirsch, Dan's father-in-law, who has had one or another form of
cancer now for 40 years, is 79., and probably is going to die from
something else someday in the distant future.

22
Which reminds me. The cancer might have to fight it out for
supremacy with still another nasty bit of work, which turned up
while I was in Georgetown Hospital last October with cellulitis. My
white blood cell count went through the roof, leading the pathologists
to suspect some weakening of my immune system. The ultimate
form of this problem is leukemia. The less severe but still
problematical form is lowered resistance to infection. I suspect the
ear and parotid infection and that awful bout with cellulitis was a
direct result of this. The Georgetown people did a bone marrow test
and when they were finished skirted the leukemia word but told
Tom Connally, my primary care physician, they would like to keep an
eye on me. Two weeks after the cellulitis was gone the white blood
count went down dramatically and I was saved from the oncologists,
who are the last court of appeal with nasty, debilitating treatments.
Dr. Connally still takes my blood count every month or so and the
last one showed, he said, that I'm "hanging in." Now if I stopped
hanging in wouldn't I be a total mess with prostate cancer and
leukemia?"
But we are not on a one track course here preparing for the
cremation, no sirree! Today we played tennis in the morning and
took in a matinee at the Shakespeare Theatre of "The Merry Wives of
Windsor," set in the 1950's at a resort in a northeastern state. Sir
John Falstaff was a grossly fat lounge singer in a neon tuxedo jacket.
The Bard's elegant Elizabethan English fitted in perfectly with the
modem setting and modem dress and the performance was first

23
rate. Slapstick comedy a la "Noises Off" and the best of Feydeau.
Llesl and I think that Shakespeare would have loved it. Modem
stage managers can set the plays with the greatest imagination as
long as they don't presume to add words to the texts left by the alltime champ. Cutting is acceptable and even highly desirable
considering that some of them could run more than four hours. We
once met a woman from Winnipeg who never read Hamlet but swore
after seeing a provincial performance that it began with the king and
queen copulating on stage. It would be too easy to make and lose
that bet. A director had probably speeded the plot along by
producing it on a two level stage, showing the couple in bed while all
the words and byplay with that tiresome ghost and the rest of the
exposition went on above. Sounds pretty neat.
Wednesday, April 1
The cherry blossoms have never looked quite as good. We made the
annual pilgrimage to the Tidal Basin early on our way to Sibley
Hospital for, what with everything including waiting time, was five
hours of tests to check on whether metastases have jumped the gun
on my newly diagnosed prostate cancer.
The first test was a nuclear medicine bone scan, head to toe, made
visible by an intravenous injection of polyphosphates. Takes 24
minutes, with the machine moving me slowly through the process,
toe to head. It creates a life-sized stretch of film which the
specialists can examine and tell my doctor meta-yes or meta-no,

24

helping enormously in letting the physician know the extent of the


treatment needed. No metastases obviously simplifies the process,
letting him zero in on the only remaining culprit, the prostate. After
finishing the bone scan the technician asked me if I would please
empty my bladder so her pictures could be clearer. My poor,
benighted bladder had done its all at first call and I said I couldn't
accomodate her with another drop. This overgrown cyst, as it is
known in the medical textbooks, is beginning to have some of the
attraction of Cyrano de Bergerac's great nose for gratuitous insults.
I was given some time out between the injection and the bone scan
to let the polyphosphates do their job of illumination. So we sat
reading for almost an hour on the rock formations at the edge of the
Potomac, where Danny does his whitewater kayaking.. Perfect day of
sunshine with temperatures maybe a little higher than we might
want at 91 degrees. But it was grand indeed. And we felt very close
to one another.
The second test, administered at 2 p.m. was a pelvic scan helped
along by an N injection of an iodine compound to create the
contrast needed by the machine to report on whether the metastases
were advancing. The most likely site would be the seminal vesicles.
Got through all of this without even thinking about the prostate or
any of the consequences that I might have to face. I didn't even
think happy thoughts like whether Lucent Technologies would just
keep on going up forever.

I just shifted into neutral and did what I

25
was told by the technicians .. The only jarring event of the day was
that the cashier at the hospital cafeteria took 25% off the bill without
even asking me if I were a senior citizen.
So, who would believe that I turned up two Gleason B's at a cocktail
party tonight? Probably anyone who understands that if you go
where geezers gather, you have a great chance of finding all the
fashionable .krankheits of the senior years. I didn't start this
conversation, but I had plenty of questions once it got going. I never
said a word about my own Gleason B or indicated that I knew the
secret handshake. The news goes like lightning when you come out.
I play in a rather tough Friday doubles group where I am by far the
oldest man on the two courts we use and I don't think it would be
appropriate to have these people think I'm on my way out. But I
sure was interested in hearing all about someone else's tsouras. One
of the B's I flushed out tonight is an old college professor named
Seymour. He not long ago was cured of a lymphoma and the prostate
cancer waited its turn. He said his nodule is still confined to the
prostate, but his doctor has prescribed and he is undergoing a course
of 40 external beam radiation treatments. The other is a guy about
my age named Amil, who goes by the name of "Ski" who was too
tired from his radiation treatments to come to this party. He was
representated by Ray, who also answered to Sasha as a nickname a
few years ago. Ray, a former FBI man, is Ski's partner in a long,
steady relationship. He is maybe 20 years younger, very busy with
being full-time nurse and very worried about the future of Amil's
cancer. The nodule has broken out of the prostate and he's on a 40

26

treatment radiation course. So why isn't Seymour, at least, on the


one time seeding treatment. He says he is not eligible because he has
had a transurethral resection of the prostate, known as TURP. I've
had my prostate shaved too. That's disturbing news because seeding
seems to me the best of the options. I'll have to ask Banfield about
this.
Thursday, April 2
I brought Pete up to date on my condition this afternoon when he
happened to call during the afternoon to book the spare bed at Hotel
Wittenberg on April 20 during a trip to Washington for Boeing. His
pause after hearing the family news was eloquent. Then he said
"Wow!" He wanted all the details, but when he heard that I had a
friend in the condo at this moment who was installing software on
my Mac he was even more interested in the details of what was
going into my computer. He is a very good son and very concerned
about me.. Peter has always been the precise member of this family.
If you ask him for the time you are apt to get a lesson on how to

make a watch. He used the proceeds of his Alexandria-wide high


school cash math prize as a token down payment for his first year at
MIT. Llesl and I provided all the rest needed for him to graduate as
a Double E. He then went for a fellowship and advanced degree in
electrical engineering at Georgia Tech. Now he's with Boeing as a
radar expert. We Wittenbergs came out in force for his graduation,
Llesl and Danny and I. Dan met us in Atlanta, on vacation from the
University of Chicago, having toured the south sampling jobs in his

27
1964 Mustang, with a 1969 door and assorted parts from other
years. He had just come from Metter, Georgia, where he was an
itinerant farm hand for a week and had a testimonial to tell us about.
"You know, mom and dad," he said, "when I said goodbye the farmer
shook my hand and said, ' Dan, you 're a good man. Whenever you
need a job, you're welcome here!."'
In the middle of the graduation ceremony came a wonderful
moment. We were all standing for the heartfelt singing of "I'm a
rambling wreck," lyrics provided by the Georgia Tech administration.
Who knew it had five verses and that the third is corny, sexist
poesy beginning with "If I had a daughter sir, I'll tell you what I'd
do ...... " ? At that instant, through the layers of mortarboards, Pete
turned his head, caught our eyes and rolled his. The four of us
reacted as one to something ridiculous.
I phoned Dan at his office around 3 p.m. Typical Danny patter! Gotta
make a joke out of it. One minute of shtick. At least I was going to
outlive his 12-year-old dog,Sheena, he said, whose hindquarters
arthritis was now so bad that she could no longer get up and he was
forced to condemn his great love to euthanasia. He sat with this
great hulk of a dog in his lap, petting and cuddling her while the vet
injected the needle. We were invited to her funeral in his backyard
on Saturday. Poor Sheena. When I told Danny that the Mid Atlantic
tennis ratings had just come out and I was No. 3 in Virginia and No. 7
in the 75's in the Mid Atlantic he quipped again: "You better hurry if
you're going to ever make #1." He's really a big softie and I know he

28
loves me.

29

Liesl and I are so lucky! These two men, surprise entries in our lives
in the 19SO's, couldn't be more upstanding and warm and loving and
entirely different from each other. How did we come up with a math
and science wizard and an expert in international shipping? Dan
constantly needs new challenges. During his school holidays he
seemed to be collecting material for some world's championship
essay contest on "What I did on my summer vacation." In his teens
he cycled across the country, Virginia to the Oregon shore. He sailed
alone for a week down the mile-wide and choppy Potomac to
Chesapeake Bay in a flimsy seven foot catamaran. We waved him off
from a Washington marina with great trepidation and a storm
brewing. We couldn't stop him. So we smiled. Our parting gift was a
nautical chart for the Potomac in a waterproof pouch, something he
had somehow neglected to come up with among his gear. Another
summer he was a deckhand on a Mississippi River barge and when
he tired of that switched to crewing on an oil rig in the Gulf of
Mexico. His track coach at Chicago expressed admiration for his 5'6"
pole vaulter and the university's entry in peripheral sports like
steeplechase. "I like Dan," he told me. "He wins me points." Dan, in
his spare time at age 41, refuses to believe that he is no longer 20
and enthuses over all the new kidsports like snowboarding and
daredevil rollerblading. We must have done something right or-let's put it this way: Liesl must have done something right. She was
the linchpin during their formative years. I was playing cards at the
Press Club. (Said Sir Christopher Wren I am going to dine with some
men. If anyone calls I'm designing St. Paul's.) Great guys, both of
them!

30

Friday, April 3
This was the day of reckoning and I reckon liesl was right about
what would happen when she said we were lucky. Still, the
significance of finding a parking space in Washington, D.C. was as
nothing compared with the news offered now by W. Landon Banfield.
He removed almost all the trepidation by telling us that both of the
tests at Sibley were negative. No metastases! The monster stands by
itself on the prostate and is highly treatable. A major relief. Since
the tumor is isolated it also means that it can be treated via internal
radiation seeding, called brachytherapy. One session as opposed to
35 or 40 consecutive days of beam therapy. Except for some
discomfort, it sounds as if I can get as active as I wish the very next
day.
Banfield says that my TURP was 15 years ago and will not interfere
with the seeding. He wants me to meet another urologist in his
office, Dr. Lailas, to get started on planning for it. We will get
together at 3 p.m. Tuesday so I can have an exact description of the
procedure and hear the pros and cons of choosing this therapy.
Apparently there will not be a rush to the operating table. It takes
at least three months to get the seeds the operation requires from a
company near Atlanta.

31
We're really relieved, Llesl and I. We decided to celebrate by
breaking open a bottle of Moet that has been hanging around the
condo since last December. Good stuff. We finished the champagne,
helped along with some fancy liver pate picked up at the Madrid
airport last year on some fancy crackers from Sutton Place. L'chaim!
Hey, if I make it to birthday 80, we've just made a plan to take the
whole family, the two sons, their wives and the combined five
grandkids to Cambridge Beaches in Bermuda for two weeks in the
year 2000! That would be nice.

Monday, April 6
Talked to "Ski" on the phone today. Thought he would enjoy of the
story of the Polish pope and the Jew that was in last Sunday's New
York Times. (Sounds like the opening of a joke on a Pullman parlor
car, but it's really about a long friendship of John Paul II that
overturned years of negative Vatican policy toward Israel) Yes, he
had his own Times and could find it. No, he was not receiving
visitors. He sounded so pained and frightened. He gets daily
radiation treatments, which leave him totally exhausted. On top of
that it hurts him to pee after each treatment. A burning in the
urethra and also, he says, the rectum.
"As if all that isn't enough," he said, "I've got an infection of the
prostate and I'm on antibiotics. Levaquin. Lot of blood and pus."

32
He is miserable. His one joy is in the care he is getting from Ray.
He's acting the part of full time nurse, housekeeper, cook and
comforter. "He's got it tougher than I do," said Ski. Poor Ski! He's a
vigorous guy who works out and takes an interest in everything--a
lot of international travel, symphonic music, theater and up to the
last couple of years, a regular tennis doubles. He also conducts a
long- running, seven day a week early morning session in Tai Chi for
the neighbors.
Personally, I'm relaxed now and ready for what comes, but naturally
stories like this can't help but raise apprehension. Liesl says the
nodule is going to behave and stay encapsulated within the prostate,
just asking to be eliminated with seeding. Why? Because we are
lucky, that's why. Evidence? Didn't we get an impossible-to-find
parking space at the tidal basin immediately for the best free show
in Washington? Didn't we get a royalty check from Blackwell today
right out of the blue for the book we have virtually forgotten? All of
these things are the dowsers for finding pure water in the urine and
an aggressive cancer that will turn out to be a pussy cat that sits up
politely and asks to be cured.
I feel just great. No symptoms except the entirely unrelated (we
hope!) problem with my right jaw which still hurts though the
infection that started it seems to be completely gone. We hit some
tennis balls in the morning and I couldn't have had a smoother game.
No pains, no aches.

33
Tuesday, April 7
Enter Dr. Nicholas Lailas, who Banfield calls Nico. He's about 40, a
handsome, athletic Georgetown med school grad who gave up a
Harvard practice to please his homesick-for-Washington wife who
felt the walls closing in in Boston. Lailas has a very effective way of
presenting the problems and the various types of solutions-everything from watchful waiting, no treatment at all which is
recommended for the Gleason 2's and 3 's to the endless weeks of
beam radiation for the most advanced. His specialty is
brachytherapy, or seeding. It is done with a catscan to make the
insertion of the radioactive seeds exact to within a millimeter in the
precise area of the prostate where the cancer is located. He says his
team's success rate is so far 99% and he hasn't really given up on the
one patient who has not worked out completely well. He
investigated and found that the cancer tissue had invaded the
seminal vesicles before the procedure and messed up his perfect
score. He plans to have a second go at this man.
Lailas outlined some steps. First, I must talk to the radiation
oncologist on his brachytherapy team, Dr. Panos Koutrovelis, who
must be on hand while the operation is under way. Why? Because
he is the one certified to work with radioactive material. I have an
appointment with him on Tuesday, April 14, at 10:30 a.m. in his
office in Tysons Corner. He will have to order palladium isotopes
which my Gleason 8 requires, as opposed to the iodine isotope, which
does its best work on the lower numbers. One, however, does not

34

mess around with eights, I was told. Using iodine instead of


palladium with the upper numbers is like sending a boy to do a
man's job. The waiting period for palladium is about three months.
Footnote: The iodine isotope is made by Johnson & Johnson, in which
we are very minor but happy stockholders. Bought it at 40 during
the Tylenol scare and flourished because we couldn't believe that a
company which made such universally acceptable products as Band
Aids and baby powder and, of course, Tylenol, could be knocked off
by an incipient panic. And, of course, we bet right on the market-for one of the few times in our lives.
The seeding will be performed under an epidural block which will
anesthetize my lower parts plus a sedative. So I'll be awake while
they work on me. He is planning to leave me with an indwelling
catheter for two weeks because of my unpredictable bladder but I
expect to talk him out of it. One day of the catheter should be plenty.
The doctor also warned us that while he hasn't seen any cases of
incontinence from this procedure yet, it was possible that I could
wind up dripping here and there till the end of time. Seems a very
long shot. Also, hmmm, it could cause impotence although they
actually haven't seen any of that yet either. And for a month after
the procedure I will feel constantly as if I have to urinate., not to
mention that I will be radioactive for S7 days and for part of that
time anethema to our youngest grandkids. It's hard to picture any
woman horny enough to consider a walking Chernobyl a suitable

35
candidate for sex soon after the implant but if so the word is to use a
condom because of the radiation. A lead condom?
Tuesday, April 14:
Today Liesl and I met Dr. Panos Koutrouvelis, who trained in Athens,
did his residency in Kansas and spent the next 35 years practicing
nuclear medicine. The first thing you notice about him--before you
see him--is that he works in two languages. You can hear this from
the waiting room. You can hear him in Greek and you can hear him
in English. When you meet him, a heavy set man, he gives the
impression of tremendous outward energy. You have the feeling that
you are dealing more with a scientist than a doctor. He has a very
pleasant manner and it is worth trying to understand what he is
saying with that thick Greek accent. He is in shirtsleeves, a freshly
laundered and starched shirt with two buttons unbuttoned and the
back of the collar up. Gives the impression of not being aware or of
not being too interested in his appearance. He seemed to see me as
merely the necessary surrounding of my prostate, a cross-section of
which he has before him on a computer screen which he hugs with
his huge shoulders.

Liesl and I thought this session was to be an in

and outer, but it ran to more than four hours, what with his
prescribing a 45 minute MRI, in addition to the catscan which gave
him a computer picture of the prostate to work with, using a grid to
decide where to place 150 seeds with precision. The time was also
consumed with consultations with Koutrouvelis, a trip to his office in

36

Seven Comers for a chest xray and ekg, the drawing of blood and the
usual hanging around the doctor's waiting room.
"How old are you?" asked Dr. K
"77."
"Too young for 77."
"Give me another chance. 42!"
"Better." He stared at the cross section of my urinary tract on the
computer screen and asked: "What about this big bladder?"
I told him its history, about how it had once flared up but had long
been tamed. But it didn't satisfy him. "I don't like this big bladder.
It worries me," he said. But getting back to his specialty he told me
when I asked him that my radiation seeding is going to cost more
than $15,000. The palladium alone costs $7,000. God bless

Medicare! I wish everyone could have this excellent insurance. It is


a terrible thing to have to weigh an essential operation against one's
ability to pay for it.
Brachytherapy can be done with precision because of a remarkably
coordinated 3-D, computer driven procedure that jabs multiple
needles carrying radioactive seeds into the prostate while protecting
the urethra, seminal vesicles and rectum. I will be anesthetized like

37

a woman about to deliver a baby--an epidural block plus sedation,


leaving me groggy but aware. Dr. K has done 200 of these
procedures and the team is still grousing about the one that didn't
work. The sole object is to kill the cancer with intense radiation.
Would you believe 12,000 degrees centigrade?
It does not thrill me to be the subject of this excavation. It sounds
uncomfortable, and how could it be anything else, even with the
anesthesia? But the doctors did a great job of convincing Liesl and
me that this was the procedure of choice. It was my call all right but
they tilted it a little. And not only am I getting it, I'm getting it next
week! Dr.K., learning that I had a Gleason 8, decided that waiting
three months for the arrival of palladium isotopes would be a
mistake. The cancer might decide to metastasize within that time-or maybe, he said, it already had moved on to my abdomen and
lymph nodes. "We can't take a chance. We will use iodine, which we
can get immediately, for the radiation seeds."
The idea that the tumor may already be coursing through my body
undid all my carefully wrought assurances that I was going to come
out of this experience OK. I had been told by Dr. Banfield that my
tests for metastasis were negative. The bone scan and pelvic scan
showed nothing abnormal. Also, hadn't I just learned that iodine is
not strong enough for B's and 9's? These needed the powerful hired
gun, palladium. "How can you be sure that iodine can do this job?" I
asked Dr. K. "Because we'll use enough seeds to kill the tumor." Uhhuh. Didn't convince me for an instant.

38

We glimpsed Dr. K. late in the afternoon in his xray office. He called


me in for a moment and kept on harping about that ominous big
bladder. "It worries me," he groused.
Thursday, April 16:
Took my doubts by telephone to Dr. Banfield. What about the
speculation that the cancer might already have spread? "We have no
evidence of that," he said. "He said that because it was a Gleason 8. If
it had been a 7 he wouldn't have said that." What if the cancer has
spread to the abdomen? We'd only be seeding the prostate, right?
"If it reached the abdomen no radiation would work," said Banfield.

"Besides, it is very doubtful that it has left the prostate. Your PSA is
only 7." He wound up the conversation by saying that he'd be with
me for another 22 years if God kept him alive. My turn to
interview. Do you have a problem? No, but the family history isn't
so great. Boy, would I like to keep him alive! What about the
iodine? Dr. K. knows what he is doing, Banfield said. Anyhow, I am
now fully back with the program, convincing myself that I am
relieved of all doubts, and preparing myself for a long siege by doing
heavier than usual morning workouts.
Friday, April 17:
Relieved of all doubts, hah! That didn't last overnight. First, I
started to worry about the proximity of that procedure "next

39

week"(no date given) to our departure for Cozumel on April 28 and


after a session of Should I, Shouldn't I? decided to phone Dr. Lailas to
see if all the doctors had agreed upon the exact date of the
brachytherapy. While they claim that there are almost no side
effects or complications and that patients often drive themselves
home and have a hearty dinner, my experience tells me that when
doctors mess around with the plumbing there is almost always some
unpleasantness for at least a day . Not the kind of difficulties one
looks forward to on a holiday.
At 10 a.m. I left a telephone message for Lailas, who wouldn't be in
the office until 2 p.m. Because the wait for a return call would screw
up a tennis game, I took Liesl's suggestion to send him a fax, the
general idea of which was the suggestion that they wait with the
procedure until we get back from Mexico on May 2--if they could
negotiate with the aggressive 8 to wait around to be killed instead of
figuring a way to kill me.
When we got back home in the afternoon Dr. Lailas returned the call,
which--had it not been my genitourinary system they were messing
around with--had the makings of a lovely comedy of errors. "Mr.
Wittenberg," he announced, "your procedure is scheduled for July 8."
July 8? July 8! I was loaded for bear, or at least for urologist. Why
would Dr. K, I asked, have insisted on setting it up right away ("next
week") because Gleason 8's are notoriously uncooperative and could
metastasize anytime, maybe had done it already? Because of the
risk, I went on, he was willing to sacrifice palladium as the radiation

40
source for the milder but more easily available iodine isotope. How
could he now justify the wait to July 8? The conversation ended
without any answers, except that I said I was going along with
whatever Dr. Banfield thought was right.
When Liesl and I got back from an afternoon errand, Lailas had left a
long phone message. "You're correct, Mr. Wittenberg!. You're on for
April 23. July 8 was the earliest date when the palladium seeds
could be delivered and Dr. K thought that was unacceptable. He is
indeed going to do the implant with the iodine seeds. But there is
another small problem. In reviewing the scan, Dr. K found a small
papilloma--or something--in the diverticulum of the 'big bladder.' He
says this must be attended to before the implant."
Well, another surprise. But whatever this second intrusion into my
bladder turns out to be, it has been 22 years in coming.

Maybe

itcould be a carcinoma this time. Dr. Banfield will do a cystoscopy


in his office on Monday.. I don't know enough about bladder cancer
to speculate on the prognosis, but I do know a doleful, biblicalsounding quote that Liesl brought into this marriage, origin
unknown: "Oh God, if you must take me don't take me through the
bladder!." Of course it may be nothing, as Banfield says in moments
like this. We'll see.
To add to the confusion of this strange day, there was a phone
message from Dr. Lailas at 5:30 p.m. reminding me to phone
Ban.field's office for an appointment and, by the way, "I'm not sure

41

that your implant is scheduled for April 23. I haven't seen the book
or been able to talk to anyone about it. I'll talk to you on Monday
afternoon when I'm in the office with Dr. Banfield."
All of this, of course, has brought us to a standoff on the Cozumel
trip. I'm thinking now that maybe we should move the April 28
date ahead for a week or two and stop trying to squeeze it into the
inexact schedule for all the bladder and prostate activity coming up
next week. These things always take more time than one expects
and, damn it, I guess the cancer has to take precedence.
We had dinner at Dan's house, prepared by his mother-in-law, Lotte.
Otto and Ruth were there, plus Walter and Lotte, Dan's in-laws, and
Otto's sister, Suza, not to mention our three resident grandchildren-Alex, Jamie and Andy. We haven't told anyone but our sons--and
recently Ski-- about my Big C. I thought it might relieve some of the
misery from that big hulk to know there's someone else around
sharing his problem. I guess that's the theory of the thriving
prostate cancer support groups, but I simply hate discussing it with
the outside world and watching the eyes react as if they have just
had a contact with death. I think it makes the most uninteresting
conversation except with the three intimates in my life, who have a
stake in the outcome. Anyhow, since no one at the dinner regarded
me with discernible pity, apparently Janet (whom Dan has surely
told) hasn't told her parents.
Saturday, April 18

42

Spoke to Continental Airlines. The Cozumel trip is flexible and could


be moved well into May if we wish. Requires only $30 (for the two
of us) to revise the schedule. And we can add days at a very low
rate. So much for that part of the problem. Won't bother about it
again until we're packed and ready to go!
Monday, April 20

Dr. Banfield greeted me by apologizing for dragging me down to his


office for what would probably be a wild goose chase. "They don't
know this bladder like I do but they see a shadow on the MRI and
insist that I take a look." He kept on low-balling the possibilities
until he and his cystoscope were eye-to-eye with a well developed
tumor the size of an adult thumbnail.

"It's there all right," he said somberly while withdrawing the


cystoscope. He seemed crushed to have had someone else discover
the tumor in a bladder he has been watching twice a year for 2 2
years. My idol hadn't exactly fallen but he had stumbled a little. I
felt hurt but resigned and I didn't have the heart to make him feel
any worse. I remember telling a Harvard Med School cardiologist
during a tennis changeover in Bermuda how important my urologist
was in my life. He replied correctly: Men love their urologists
because they help them pee." You can say that again.

43

Well, what would you have bet that the little "something" in my
bladder would tum out to be a growth so well developed that it
almost spells out cancer in skywriting? Save your money. It's
there. My body cavity is becoming as crowded with strangers as the
Marx Brothers' stateroom scene. Dr. Banfield says it looks like a low
grade tumor.. It has to be removed without delay and it must take
precedence over the prostate seeding. He's going to remove it on
Wednesday morning at Sibley Hospital. The procedure is done
through the urethra under anesthesia. The tumor is lassoed with a
metal loop and pulled out. Poof! Just like that--but not quite.
As with everything else in this case, it has complications. The growth
is in that freakish diverticulum, which unlike my other, the original
bladder I was born with, has very thin walls and no muscle
thickness. If Dr. Banfield finds evidence that it is threatening the
wall, he will be required to do another operation: make an
abdominal incision, cut out the diverticulum and restitch the bladder
more into the shape it presumably started out to be. If I live
through this complicated little drama in my 78th year--and nobody
has threatened my mortality yet--it will be nice not to have to pee
through two bladders for a change. And if I don't maybe liesl could
get them reunited and donate them to some medical peep show as
The World's Largest.
Meanwhile, suppose that tomorrow the pathologist confirms that it is
a cancer. Lots of questions. How long has it been there? Has it
metastasized? Is it related to the prostate tumor? If so, which one

44
metastasized, assuming that one has? Can I expect that there will be
more? Sooner rather than later? And will I find out if the grim
reaper has upgraded his scythe to the latest model John Deere to get
into the spirit of the millenium? Actually, I've already been on
borrowed time for 26 years considering that my father died at 52 of
a heart attack. My mother's last illnesses at 66 were a stroke and old
age diabetes. We had no cancer history in the family.
This growth was spotted on the MRI by that bulldog, Dr. K. He didn't
like my bladder and damned if he wasn't going to find something
wrong with it. Drs. Banfield and Lailas tell me that radiologists often
see things that wind up as false positives, but you have to be alert
and check out their sightings. On mine he saw a shadow on the
bladder and warned--make that harangued--my doctors.
There are 2 ,000,000 people around the world living with bladder
cancer. In the U.S. 50,000 men and about 15,000 women join the
club each year. If caught and treated early it is almost always cured,
but it is the cause of death annually for about 9,000 people. Smoking
is the Number One risk factor, which leaves me out. I gave it up cold
turkey after 23 years of hevy smoking in 1960 before the Surgeon
General's report when a Cleveland doctor put a stethoscope to my
lungs and thought he was hearing bagpipes. Even when the
urologist removes the entire tumor, there is a 75% chance of
recurrence, so the bladder must be monitored every three months
for the first year by cystoscope. The worst case scenario for
advanced bladder cancer is the complete removal of the bladder,

45

leaving the patient with a permanent external urine bag. This is


truly a tough way to live and entirely unacceptable to me.
Another convolution on the date for the seeding: Pushed back to July
8. Where have I heard that date before? And we're off the iodine
and back to palladium. The delay is to give my body time to recover
from tomorrow's bladder invasion. Will the Gleason 8 really obey
the Banfield-Lailas schedule? Can it be trusted not to take a walk?
"With Lupron, yes!" said Dr. Banfield, and Lailas nodded in
agreement. "I'm doing a radical prostate operation tomorrow on a
59-year-old man who should have had it last December but he was
discovered to have lung cancer during the prepping ..His lung had to
be removed first. He's had Lupron injections and it kept the prostate
cancer on hold. Very dangerous, but still all in one place."
I've had a three-month shot of Lupron too. Its a member of a class
of drugs known as luteinizing hormone releasing-hormone analogs
(or LHRH analogs to the cognoscenti). What it does is shut down the
formation of the male hormone testosterone by the testicles.
Testosterone, which makes men men, also works on tumors like
kerosene thrown on a fire, and encourages travel. Lupron is among
the urologists' best friends because it gives the physicians time to
plan the definitive treatment. Its miraculous method of circulating
singlemindedly in the body for 90 days without being absorbed has
the old-fashioned ring of a shaman's cure after dancing over his
patient with a mask and a rattle. One injection of 22.5 mg. of Lupron
in the buttocks is time-released continuously and consistently daily

46

over the next three months. Some testosterone is also produced in


the brain so a drug has been developed to deal with that too. I'm on
a daily dose of one tablet of Casodex, another IRRH, which specializes
in drying up the male hormone in the head.
It's a bit unnerving to rely on a couple of drugs that attack my
manhood to halt a potentially wild tumor, but if Banfield says it's
going to work it's going to work. Think of the good stuff: We're
leaving for Cozumel on Tuesday and we're cleared to extend the
three booked days to a full week in Yucatan. And I'm registered in
two senior USTA-sanctioned national tennis tournaments in
California during May.
Thursday, April 23:
The last time I was a patient in Sibley Hospital I was murphied out
of $30 by my roommate, a sweet-talking southerner about 40 who
could easily have been the Washington lobbyist for Southern Pacific
Railroad that he claimed to be. I was there for a TURP; he was being
treated for a back injury. He said he had this very buddy-buddy
relationship with the SP's CEO and had available to him virtually
unlimited passenger rail tickets to anywhere on the continent for
public relations use. We spent three days together in that hospital
room and the friendship grew along with the hallucinations. He
offered free tickets for my two sons and their wives. And, of course,
unlimited use of the railroad by liesl and myself. Choose your
destinations, round-trip! And I was just brain-dead enough to

47

believe his whole story--the only one, incidentally, in my family who


did. Danny was convinced I had gone nuts, and Liesl, sweet Liesl,
considered my delicate condition as she reluctantly wrote him a
check at my insistence, over his protest of course. It was entirely my
idea. This sweeping gesture was to cover the expenses he might
personally incur in fulfilling his generous offer. It was cashed
immediately after I was discharged, endorsed by a check-cashing
joint in a seedy section of Washington which phoned Liesl to confirm
she had written the check. Soon after, Liesl got a phone call from a
bar room Romeo who knew her name and giggled his way through a
proposition.
So, when my Sibley roommate yesterday, a garrulous 84-year-old
retired army colonel, mentioned that among the many jobs he had
before his army service was a stint as a Southern Pacific gandy
dancer, I unobtrusively as possible pulled my curtain and plugged
my ears. It didn't stop him. He told of his otherwise helpless 90year-old blind wife, once an economics professor and still a devout
Catholic, who splits her cable TV listening days between a Wall Street
oriented channel and Mother Angelica, a hope and fund raising
religious figure who broadcasts nationally out of a small Alabama
town. She, the professor, listens for tips and simply cleans up in the
stock market, sharing her booty between their middle aged children
and the good Mother in the small Alabama town. Not long ago, he
said, she bought one of their sons a present of a $45,000 Ford from
her earnings on Intel. When my phone rang during his tale, he kept
on talking right through my conversation, never missing a beat. One

48

part began, "And in 1955 I was assigned to Fort Myer." The colonel
was at Sibley for a TURP. I never got around to telling him about
mine, nor offering him free passes on the roadbed of his old
employer.
I was there, of course, to have that bladder tumor excised. The
operation was performed, through the urethra, by Dr. Banfield
Wednesday morning. Llesl waved a goodbye kiss as I, gorgeous in a
hospital gown that she said was me, absolutely me, was wheeled to
the pre-op room lying flat on a stretcher. Dr. Banfield came by and
chatted. I took a bold step. "After 22 years, why don't you call me
Ernie?" "Wait till we get through this," he answered, on his way out
the door. Then the anesthesiologist, a Filipino doctor, dropped by to
introduce himself. He was going to, he said, give me an N to put me
to sleep during the procedure. He tapped the back of my hand,
looking for prospective veins, and left. When I was wheeled into the
operating room only the anesthesiologist was there. He started the
N and I was out instantaneously. I never saw Dr. Banfield. And

when I woke up in the recovery room an hour later attached to a


catheter whose contents were admired by a variety of nurses. "Nice
and clear" was one of the comments.
Thursday, April 23
Dr. Banfield came in at 8 a.m. and gave me a blow by blow
commentary on the operation. He snipped the growth and took
biopsies all around the diverticulum and the bladder and sent the lot

49

to the lab. He illustrated his talk by drawing a crude facscimile of


my crude urological system on the back of a Sibley prescription form.
He marked a little hole just to the right of the bladder's midline,
identifying the mouth of the gargantuan diverticulum. He then did a
view from the side, showing how the balloon related to the real
bladder and taking heart at the location of the cancer. It was inside
the diverticulum, as expected, but if it decided to metastasize it had
nowhere to go but the wall of the original bladder. This is supposed
to be the good news. The bad news is that if it were a few inches
lower and I would be in dire jeopardy. It would be ideally in
position to invade the rectum.
This is good news like the eruption of Mount St. Helens was good
news, but I guess it could have been worse. I'm starting to sound
like the bluebird of happiness. Well, you can't tell the players
without a scorecard and the pathologist will let us know on Monday
if it is definitely another cancer and what damage it has already

wrought. Meanwhile, I'm out of here! He said I could go home as


soon as I proved I can pee.
To make me suitable for life in the outside world after 24 hours of
being bedridden, the nurse removed the N needle from my left
wrist and yanked off a pair of deep breathing plastic leggings that
had given me a miserable night of foot cramps. I think they had
some other purpose too. The final step was Dr. Banfield's removal of
the internal catheter. Before he did that, though, he helped me
substantially to pass my final test by priming my empty bladder

so
with saline solution to give it something to work with. The bladder
responded promptly. My roomie was given the same final without
the water and it was pitiful to hear him grunting at the bowl to no
avail. The nurse told him to stop, explaining that I could perform
because I had the advantage of the doctor's shortcut.
Because of the heavy traffic at 9 a.m. it took Liesl an hour and a
quarter to drive the 14 miles between our condo and the hospital. I
spent a few minutes saying fond farewells to the nurse and the
associates (what ever happened to hospital orderlies?) whom I
seemed always to have known. One of them was a lovely Liberian
woman whose father caused a curse on his House by breaking his
daughter's engagement to the thug who became the current dictator
of Liberia. That gave her something in common with Thomas Wolfe.
She couldn't go home again either. As we walked down the long
corridor to the elevator the old colonel was coming the other way,
ramrod up his spine, and supported at the elbow in his morning
walk by a nursing associate. From the lookin his eye I could tell he
still hadn't peed and his somewhat formal "Goodbye" told me that he
also still resented my cribbing to pass the exam,. Could you get
kicked out of West Point for that? Goodbye for now, Sibley. Looks as
if you'll be seeing me again.

Monday, April 27
If there will be a reasonable happy ending to all this urological

uproar it is not going to be anytime soon. The growth is cancerous

51
and humongous. In the lab's formal report it is a "squamous cell
carcinoma invasive into fibrous and adipose tissue." And the
"specimen consists of multiple fragments of granular tan-gray to
brown tissue approximately 8 cc's in aggregate volume." Lot of bad
words there. But on the positive side (chirp, chirp) there was no sign
of the real bladder being invaded. Only the mock.

"That diverticulum has to be removed, Mr. Wittenberg," said Dr.


Banfield on the phone And who am I to argue? As quickly as
possible, it goes without saying. But, and here comes the deja vu all
over again, we leave tomorrow for Cozumel! Flashback to 197 6, and
Dr. Banfield also stayed in character in the update. "It will take a
week to set up the operation anyhow," he said, stamping the
vacation OK. "We'll do it the week after next." He said I'd be on my
feet with a drainage tube out sticking out of my belly 24 hours after
the operation, out of the hospital in three or four days with a
catheter and recuperating at home for one month.

Now the impact of the invasion is really starting to hit home. It is


beginning to interfere with things I like to do. It means no tennis for
a month, which is like trying to cure drug addiction by cold turkey.
withdrawal. The game long ago replaced the poker table as
recreation. It costs less and it is mostly day work. Liesl thinks the
change is good for my health and our marriage and it is certainly less
expensive than trying to draw to an inside straight. So the delightful
ping of a racket hitting a tennis ball solidly is my siren song and call
to action. I've been contributing regularly to the retirement

52
programs of an impressive array of tennis coaches coast to coast and
my idea of perfection is an incredibly smooth, fully extended,
devastating crosscourt backhand shot that Sampras can't handle. I
can see it being hit by Rod the Rocket Laver, who like me (bite your
tongue, Wittenberg) is a southpaw. Dream on, hacker! I once had a
lesson in the backhand and the backhand alone from Frankie Parker,
an all-time great who won the U.S. Open at Forest Hills in 1944 and
1945. He said the backhand is an easy.shot. Then he demonstrated
it step by step, beginning with the words, "All you do is ...... " A
veritable cinch! All you need is the talent.
Llesl is my enabler, constant practice partner and pigeon in this
tennis compulsion. She is ready to play when I'm ready. She is a
smart player who can chase down and return just about anything
anywhere on the court. There is documentary proof about the
potency of her backhand. A retired CIA mole lately out of Langley a
few years back went directly to the hospital from the tennis court
with an Achilles tendon tear developed while chasing one of her
shots. He was sure no woman could get a ball by him.
We hit just about every day and even chose our condominium at
least partially on its on-site indoor tennis facility in addition to four
outdoor courts. There are few to none regional tournaments for
women in her age group, so she plays down to 65 a couple of times a
year in the region to keep her franchise and the rest of the year
becomes a camp follower on the men's 75 tour, which has my
attention.

53

There are senior tournaments under way every week of the year
sanctioned by the United States Tennis Association. These,
particularly the national championships on four different surfaces,
hard courts, clay, grass and indoors, are tracked by a hard core of
70's, 7S's, 80's and 8S's who must be the most competitive group of
senior citizens in the country. Tennis is their life and they come to
the tournaments as to Lourdes despite all the known afflictions of
mankind. They arrive with single and double hip replacements,
cancers of all kinds, pacemakers, quadruple and quintuple bypasses,
hip to ankle braces on both legs, and recalling one of my opponents
at the Army & Navy Country Club a couple of years ago, a broken
neck in a huge horse collar. He said it just helped him keep his head
down when he hit, which is what you're supposed to do anyhow. The
talk of the circuit last year was about the spectacular shoulder
operation on the playing arm of Tom Brown, the #1 seed in the 75's
and a winner all the way back to 1947 when he won the men's
doubles at Wimbledon with Jack Kramer and lost to Kramer in the
singles final. Big time player, then and now. To repair this priceless
engine the doctors actually removed the arm, corrected the problem
and put it all back together ready to wipe out the competition, as
usual--without losing a season.
The old warriors arrive at the next tournament usually a day early
by plane, car, camper and RV ready to second guess the seeding,
check out the courts, trade stories and warm up with practice singles
and doubles matches. Some of these old birds have been playing

54

against each other in USTA competition since they were 30 and they
know each other's games thoroughly. Age slows them down
somewhat but the skills and grace and delicate shots are all still
there. Liesl was once asked if she would serve as an official at a
match between a couple of 85 year olds. Their game was beautiful to
watch and very competitive. They just couldn't remember the score
and needed someone to do it for them. The pressure is now on for
USTA to sanction a 90's tournament, but the officials seem content
for now to let the 90s play down into the 85's. These tournaments
are the only place I have heard old people wishing themselves older,
becoming the youngster on the block in the bracket above them.
They dreaming of running right through the draw against opponents
as much as four years their senior, and avoid beatings from players
as much as four years younger. Every year adds a little more
handicap.
I've never won one of these tournaments, which is no surprise. The
winners are almost always predictable among a few players with
blue ribbon lifetime records. They are often club pros. If I get
through one round I consider myself lucky. And for my expenses
I'm getting demonstrations on how to win from the best in the
business. I am sore as hell that I'm going to miss the hard court
championship in Rancho Santa Fe, north of San Diego, and the indoor
matches in San Francisco.
Cozumel, Tuesday, April 28,

SS

We had planned this Mexican island vacation long before we knew


anything about prostate cancer, bladder cancer, the imminence of an
operation, Lupron (ahem), Casodex and the specter of one's mortality.
That stuff is not the baggage one usually packs for a week in the sun
and the sea, but as they say they say down here, we'll worry about it

manana. Besides the baggage, we carried the real necessities-tennis rackets, a couple of hundred dollars worth of snorkeling gear
and a credit card.
Cozumel is an island just off Yucatan where prosperity struck the still
surprised population when nearby Cancun got too expensive and
overcrowded and Cozumel's harbor was perfect for the large cruise
ships. The boom tourist trade has caused the residents to become
trilingual--Spanish and English and the Mayan that is still spoken at
home. The cruise ships converge on it. We counted six tied up in one
day at the International pier across from our beachfront hotel. We
discovered this place on the Internet in a Continental Airlines deal
too good to pass up, but I must say that with our usual sheer luck
we've got it right.
Snorkeling is great. The temperature appears to stay a steady 84
degrees. The only tennis court, with a good all-weather surface, is
always open for us because we play before breakfast, and the meals
are good. The one town on the island, a charmer called San Miguel, is
about three miles down the beach road and is laid out on a
magnificent plan. The town square, called Plata del Sol, is centered
with broad umbrellaed shade trees, a variety of palms,and a

56

bandstand and appears large enough to hold the entire 75,000


Cozumeleftos plus the passengers and crew of the six cruise ships.
Someone up there in the ayuntamiento and the chamber of
commerce must be worrying about the zoning because the stores and
restaurants on the four sides of the square blend in nicely with the
town's surprisingly sophisticated mood. All in all a nice prescription
for a pre-operative environment.
Cozumel,Thursday, April 30
There was blood in the urine this morning and it didn't go away.
Very red. And now I don't know which one is acting up, my prostate
or my bladder. I popped an antibiotic and off we went, as planned
and paid for, to the pride of the Mayan civilization, Chichen Itza.
Getting there from an island paradise isn't half the fun. First you
have to get to the airport. Then you have to pay the airport
departure tax of $18 a person. We were told to look for Jose, the
major domo for Mayair Airlines, one of the best kept secrets of the
Cozomel Airport. Jose has to recognize you as the helpless gringo
because there are no special character-istics of Jose. He doesn't wear
a uniform, he doesn't carry an umbrella, he's just some completely
unidentified Jose. We stayed very close to four very tall, very blond
young people from St. Louis who could not be considered anything
but vacationing gringos, and finally the true Jose approached them
with boarding instructions.

57

The Lockheed 410 we finally boarded was at the other end of the
field and a family group from Texas with a two-year-old beginning
to feel the heat, but we all made it and it took off. It no sooner took
off then it landed again eight minutes later on the coast of the
Yucatan mainland, at the tiny airport of Playa del Carmen. The copilot jumped out with some paper and two passengers boarded the
plane to become part of our tour. The co-pilot came back, the airport
manager gave him another set of papers and gave him the signal that
no planes were landing. Next stop Chichen Itza.
Flying over the peninsula was like tracing history. There were
obvious fields that had long ago been abandoned and were growing a
different green than the surrounding shrubs. Then near active
sinkholes were brown fields, some of them still smoking from a slash
and burn form of agriculture and here and there were newly plowed
fields sprouting. The villages were nowhere near the fields and
paths leading into the bush emerged miles later at the worked fields.
Nothing much seems to have changed since the Mayans except the
architecture and houses of worship. Then we saw the famous
pyramid from 1,000 magazine ads and encyclopedia illustrations
from the air.
At the airport we were picked up by taxis and delivered to the
entrance to Chichen Itza, which boasts a huge tourist shopping mall
and traffic that would delight Macy's. Our tour guide, a man about
SO, swaggered like a bantam cock and wore a button that read "I

Love Tips." But once he got into the meat of his subject he was very

58

eloquent and gave us enough time to absorb the ruins. The story of
the Mayan ball games made my health problem seem rather minor.
The games were played in a field, still intact, enclosed by the walls of
two huge edifices. The goal was a Life Saver-like ring about 40 feet
up on both walls and perpendicular to them, with a hole just slightly
larger than the six pound hard rubber ball that had to be kicked
through it. One scored goal marked the end of the game, which could
last three or four days. It was also the end of the captain of the
scoring team, who was sacrificed to insure a good harvest. Our guide
assumed that there would have been a good deal of point shaving
going on. If it weren't for the honor of the sacrifice, the captain
would possibly have preferred to live.
We wound up the visit with a very pleasant hour by ourselves
among the ruins of the nunnery and the church,
Friday, May 1
Dreadful night. Awake most of it with theories of why I am bleeding
and how this complication is finally going to be the one that gets me.
Bladder diverticulum spewing the cancer cells all over the bladder? I
had a sore throat to top it off and started to take Bioxin. How do the
pharmaceutical companies invent organ specific antibiotics? My
primary care physician, Dr. Tom Connally, insisted that I pack this

one for a trip to Fiji, Samoa and Tonga last winter. It says right there
on the label "for bronchial infections." Could this be metastases of
either of the cancers--or could the leukemia have finally kicked in?

59

Has the Gleason 8 decides to rumble? End of the line. Thought about
going home early and getting medical attention before I bleed to
death but it didn't stop me from playing tennis this morning.
Thought about calling Dr. Banfield before the weekend. But what can
he say long distance? Come home? Or, would he come up with a
"Saludos Amigos!" solution like having as his great friend the finest
urologist in Mexico, with a Tuesday practice in Cozumel. The hell
with it. There are no symptoms whatsosever--except for that, Mrs.
Lincoln! We are to leave on Tuesday. Continental Airlines has
nothing open earlier. All the seats are spoken for. When I told the
Continental agent it was a medical emergency, he said we could keep
on calling his office in Mexico City until he had as couple of seats or
the second option was to go standby. Standby doesn't seem
attractive because we would also be on standby for the HoustonWashington leg. Thought I would try again on Saturday, but we've
got an all day tour in the works. You have to have some priorities.
Saturday, May 2
Mirabile dictu! The blood is beginning to fade and the yellow urine
can actually be seen in the bowl. It's getting better. Let's stay! My
mood has distinctly improved, but if it is true that your life flashes
before your eyes if you fall or jump off a skyscraper, why would I
spend three floors worth thinking about Charlie Wells, who was my
city editor at the Erie (Pa.) Times? Then again, why not? Plenty of
floors left. At 77 you have to start from the King Kong tower of the
Empire State Building to get it all in. Actually I started thinking

60
about Erie last night at dinner when we met a couple from
Chautauqua County, New York, which is marginally in the circulation
area for the Erie newspapers.
Charlie Wells was a character extraordinaire,besides being my
second post-war employer. Liesl really thinks he scared her into her
third miscarriage. And, as city editor of the extremely potent Erie
Daily Times he also scared Northwestern Pennsylvania's entire power
structure and a whole generation of reporters. He and he alone
decided what gets into the 90% of the paper called local news. The
wire editor, ripping and pasting the news hot off the AP ticker all
day across the copy desk from Charlie, handled all the rest of the
news, that is the news in the world beyond Warren, Pa. to the south,
Ashtabula, 0., to the west and Westfield, N.Y. to the northeast.
Charlie, with his gray moustache hiding his upper lip and a bulging
stomach above his belt, began his day at 7 a.m. diagramming the
entire layout for his main local page without a single story on his
desk. He expected his beat reporters to spend the morning finding
stories to fill out his day's masterwork. It required a lot of
enterprise from the reporters. You could with a little nudging
convince a publicity hungry county commissioner to say a new
courthouse was being planned. That would provide Charlie with two
stories, 1,000 words for his headline that day and maybe 500 a day
later when another of the three commissioners was coaxed into
saying that it would be built over his dead body.

61

When he had his layout in hand, Charlie got down to the really
important stuff. He picked up the phone and told his wife what they
were having for dinner that night. If he decided it was fish he called
the fish market at the foot of State Street and reviewed today's catch.
Happy with his selection he then looked around the city room to see
who was left in the city room. Suddenly everyone was busy with a
typewriter or answering a phone call until they were certain he had
found his victim.
"Paul," he would call across the room, "Got your car?
"Yes."
"Well, take and get my fish."
The meat market made life easier on the journalists by making
deliveries to the city room..
Charlie hired me after one year on the opposition afternoon daily, the
weaker Dispatch Herald, owned by Toledo lawyer Edward Lamb who
had made his name and a bunch of money as the inventor of a new
labor bargaining tool, Portal-to-Portal pay. The theory was that a
worker was entitled to full pay from the moment he crossed the
employer's threshold, not when he set up his tools after a quarter of
a mile walk through the industrial complex. Same for leaving at the
end of the day. Lamb was in a deathly circulation war with the
entrenched Times, but he badly underestimated his opponents. The

62

Times had sources in Washington that researched his liberal


background and threw in a little McCarthyism as an added attraction.
Lamb became known in conservative Erie as "Pinky lamb" and the
Dispatch-Herald's circulation dropped steadily.
The Times had no trouble forgetting its own liberal start as the strike
organ of the printers' union during a long and bitter printers'
walkout at the Dispatch, then the dominant paper. The Times'
founder and leader of the strike was John J. Mead, a wizard on the
Mergenthaler linotype and a high Catholic layman. Now John J.
Mead, Jr., a ringer for Colonel Robert McCormick, with an intensely
red beet face and a raspy voice, was the editor and his brother,
George Mead, handled the finances as publisher and business
manager. John's main interests were the stiffly conservative
editorial page and conviviality, and he left the city room in the hands
of the master, Charlie Wells. Now and then he stopped by for a chat
with the reporters and when anyone mentioned Kane, Pa-- and it
was mentioned more frequently than you might think since Kane
was in the circulation area--John would intone, as a mantra, "Icebox
of Pennsylvania," the popular cliche for the town. My brother-in-law,
Howard, went through life with that syndrome and could have been
the prototype for Mr. Arbuthnot, Frank Sullivan's cliche expert.
Mention Babe Ruth and he never failed to ome up with "Sultan of
Swat" and any conversation about Ted Williams brought an
immediate response: "Yes, the Splendid Splinter." As a kid I used to
bait him to see how long he could keep it up, but it was the poor
guy's only small talk..

63

Charlie started me off on the obituary desk, parking me next to the


eccentric veteran police reporter, Bat Humble, who with a stained
Panama hat lodged on the back of his head, banged out his stories
with two fingers, cursing his Underwood all the way. He read the
Chicago Tribune every morning and with the front page before him
said aloud with all sincerity, like a chant, "World's Greatest
Newspaper," as the Trib styled itself right there at the top of Page 1.
I got to know all the undertakers in the area and polished my prose
style with sentences like "A solemn high mass will be sung Thursday
at noon in St. Anthony's Roman Catholic Church."
I soon graduated to the county courthouse beat and then City Hall
reporter, the top of the line because it produced a daily run of above
the fold headlines for Charlie, all the copy that the mind could
imagine. I was rising in The Times' pecking order, but I was never
safe from Charlie's fish run. It rankled and I whined to Liesl. "Damn
it! I'm going to stop bringing the car to work." I finally did just that,
but it never even slowed Charlie Wells down.
"Got your car, Ernie?"
"Sorry Charlie but it's in the shop." Momentary pause, then:
"Got your car, Paul?" Yes.
"Well give the keys to Ernie so he can take and get my fish!"

64

Llesl's run in with Charlie came before they had met officially.. She
came to the Times building to pick up our new car, a 1946 Ford,
which at that time was one of the first post-war models in Erie, Pa.
Cars were very hard to come by in the early years after the war. I
was put at the top of a Ford dealer's waiting list by a phone call
from Chief of Police Donahue, who liked me, which meant simply
that I listened faithfully to his frequent recounting of the good old
days in the Erie Police Department. He'd sit in his office in front of
an antique group police photo, all of them uniformed like the
Keystone Cops, and assure me he could name every one them. And
he did, at least 10 times in three months.
The Ford was parked tightly between two cars, one of which was
Charlie's. Llesl, completely new at the operating end of a car, had
had trouble passing her parallel parking test the week earlier with
nothing in front or back of her except two snow mounds. She kept
touching the bumper of the car in front and soon understood that it
was the pride and joy of Charlie Wells. He was leaning out the
second floor window and yelling about women drivers. Llesl made it
out of the space after the third bump but the vituperation from my
boss upset her. She did her errands but she started to spot and three
days later she miscarried again. It wasn't really Charlie's temper
what done her in. It was the 4 1/2 month curse.
Llesl's Aunt Gretel, who was the pathologist for Chautauqua County,
New York, in nearby Jamestown, was alarmed. She ran all the blood

65

tests on both of us only to find that we were as compatible in Rh


factors and everything else as we were as friends and lovers. She
declared that the next time would be better and gifted us with 78
rpm recordings of the three Beethoven "Rasoumovsky" string
quartets. It gave us solace and started me on a life long
enchantment with chamber music. We saw Gretel, the sister of
Liesl's father, very frequently. She was about as much of an
anomaly in predominantly Swedish Jamestown as she had been in
pre-Nazi Vienna where she indoctrinated her predominantly Catholic
patients with family planning methods.
After she landed in New York as a refugee and had to retake her
medical degree she decided that she did not want anything more to
do with patients and specialized in pathology. Of course it didn't
quite work out that way. She still had to deal with patients and she
gave me my first glimpse of how men deal with prostate cancer. She
told us that she had to confront an old Swedish farmer with the
choice of having his testicles removed or early death. The man sat
up in his bed and said, "Not on your life! You might just as well take
me out to the barn and shoot me!" His decision seemed reasonable to
me at the time, but then I was in my 20's.
A couple of months later she asked us if we knew of a musician
named Artie Shaw. We explained that he was fame personified,
married in sequence to some of the loveliest women in Hollywood
and second only to Benny Goodman as a clarinetist and band leader.
She knew about Benny Goodman playing Mozart in Carnegie Hall.

66

But why did she mention Artie Shaw? She hedged but after a
moment's thought she said she understood why he had been so
sensible about a decision to undergo a radical prostatectomy. He had
other interests in life. In contrast to journalism today, Mr. Shaw's
sexual problems would not have been suitable reading material for a
family newspaper. I never even considered it news.
Footnote: Corny joke during the big band era. Benny Goodman
complains to his tailor about putting the fly on the side of his new
trousers rather than the front.
"You're Benny Goodman, no?" asks the tailor.
"So?"
"Well, suh-wing it, Bennyl"
There were a number of things I learned in Erie that were never
dreamt of in my philosophy, Horatio, in Jersey City or in London.
For instance, Charlie once sent me to Westfield to interview the
commanding general of the Grand Army of the Republic on his lOOth
birthday. In the 1940's centenarians were still a rarity. As a matter
of fact if a reader of the Erie Daily Times could produce four generations of a family on an important occasion like the birth of the fourth
it would make a photo and glowing cutline for all the circulation area
to admire. I came home and told Liesl that I had been very
impressed with the aged gentleman, Robert W. Rownds. How, she

67
asked, how could he have been a general in the Civil War and still be
only 100 years old in 1948? It would mean that he would have been
a general in 1865 at the ripe age of 17.
"He wasn't a general, "I said. "He was a drummer boy in the Union
Army. He became the head of the GAR, that war's American Legion,
when almost all the other veterans had been buried." It was an
insight that has sustained us for the last SO years. Stick dose to your
desks and never go to sea and you all may be rulers of the Queen's
na-vee!
Cozumel, Sunday, May 3
Woke at 3 a.m. in a sweat and angry with Dr. Banfield for not
identifying and doing something about my bladder cancer a couple of
years earlier, while we might still have avoided this coming
operation. I also came up with the weirdest idea of my illness to
date. What if all those jokes about St. Peter as the gatekeeper to
heaven that I've been hearing since I was five happen to have even
a ring of truth about them? Suppose there really is a Judgment Day
when you have to make a convincing presentation to a committee
about the grander aspects of your life? There's a huge mural in a
church in Northern Spain showing a production line of hundreds of
ordinary Joes looking miserable as they await the heaven or hell
decision. See, that's me over on the left--a little higher--with my
palms up, saying "Nu?" What can you tell these guys to impress

68
them and since this is 1998 can you bring along a slide presentation,
videos and other electronic enhancements?
"Your Excellencies, I present to you two occasions in my life that had
positive repercussions on the quality of life for many people. First,
in helping President John F. Kennedy off a difficult spot I took a part
in ensuring that what is now the Kennedy Center in Washington
would be built. And, once in Cleveland, Ohio, I saved the 1953
season of the temporarily homeless Cleveland Summer Pops
Orchestra by putting them in center field for concerts before
Cleveland Indians night games. This may have kept the fabulous
Cleveland Orchestra under the incomparable George Szell stay in one
piece."
In 1962 I was asked to join the White House staff in a shadow role.
This was the era of nuclear threats and my job had to do with
presidential relocations, continuity of the government, and staying in
communication with the American people after the bomb dropped.
Much of the work done in my office was secret so the titles were too.
I needed a high security clearance and somebody told me that I was
now presidential press secretary in case of nuclear disaster. All of
the plans for the important disaster functions had already been set
up over the years by previous holders of the office so what was left
to do mostly was periodic chopper visits to carefully camouflaged
presidential relocation sites equipped with impressive Star Trek
technology and, foremost, the need to be on call for Kennedy public

69
relations projects assigned by Pierre Salinger, the press secretary. It
was a back room Salinger operation.
I was replacing Jack Rosenthal, who was heading for an editorial job
at The New York Times. He is now the editor of its magazine. Jack
stayed around for a few days to explain the job and show me the
ropes. We were installed in Room 1 in the basement of the old
Executive Office Building next to the White House. It was a large
office with one wall covered with ceiling to floor green maps which
had no relation to our function. I liked to think they were leftover
World War I plans for Belleau Wood or some other battle. And they
might have been because the EOB had been headquarters of the War
Department as well as the State Department during WWl. During
the Nixon years Room 1 was HQfor a band of guerilla warriors, the
President's infamous "plumbers." In their most famous exploit they
broke into Democratic Party headquarters, precipitating the
Watergate scandals and its final step, the resignation of President
Nixon.
My staff consisted of a friendly sandy-haired veteran civil servant
who stayed entirely on the disaster front and a secretary whose
typing skills left much to be desired and who disappeared for as
much as two hours most mornings. She had been a TWA flight
attendant on a San Francisco-Washington run that Pierre used. She
tolerated me but quickly made clear that her loyalties and schedule
came from elsewhere. She was known to be in the Oval Office on a
number of the mornings when she was among the missing. President

70
Johnson apparently knew her too because during his Administration,
when I was installed in my own private enterprise office, the FBI
came visiting to inquire about her. Johnson was appointing her to an
important Embassy post in Rome. What did I know? I told them
everything I knew but it didn't hold up her appointment a single
day.
One day Pierre asked me to come to his office. Serious problem.
President Kennedy was due to speak next Saturday at the National
Armory at a black tie dinner launching the nation-wide drive for the
National Cultural Center to be built on the shores of the Potomac.
This center, designed by architect Edward Durell Stone with an opera
house, theater, concert hall and assorted other venues all in one
building, had bipartisan backing to end once and for all and all in one
gulp the capital's reputation as a cultural desert. The wits at the
Alfalfa Club complained that "they're trying to make a lincoln Center
of this drinkin' center."
Washington was to be linked by TV to fund-raising dinners in 10
other cities across the country where the power structures were
gathered to give the cultural center a national constituency.

The

problem? While playing golf that morning Kennedy was told by his
friend Charles Bartlett that he would be speaking to an empty hall.
Seventy two tickets had been sold in a hall that was expected to
accomodate 1,000 diners.

71
"I'm riding out with the President to dedicate Dulles Airport on
Monday, " said Pierre, "and I need your action memo to discuss with
him then." Top level stuff.
There was only one group of people in Washington that I knew of
who could be expected to buy more than 900 seats at full price in the
time available and I played them to the hilt in my memo. The
lobbyists. The private interests were always looking for ways to get
closer to administration officials and Members of Congress and they
would think they had reached lobbyists' nirvana to get an invitation
like this from the President. They needed to get their legislative
ideas heard at every influential government level, all the way up to
the Oval Office, so hobnobbing by request with the chief executive
would come under the heading of a superlatively successful day.
I proposed a full-scale White House reception and polite shakedown
for the major business interests who stalked Washington. The price
of one or two tables at the dinner would add up to chump change for
these operators, whose companies would get a tax deduction to boot.
Pierre and the President quickly accepted the idea. A telegram of
invitation signed by Jacqueline Kennedy and Mamie Eisenhower, the
co-chairs for the Center, went out immediately to lobbyists in the
District with copies to their CEOs back home at company
headquarters. There could be no question about what was expected
of them if they accepted.

72
Nothing glitters so much as the White House in full party mode and
all stops were pulled out for this occasion. The U.S. Marine Band
played as they entered. Cabinet stars McNamara, Rusk and Robert
Kennedy formed a receiving line and when the guests were gathered
in the dining room for drinks President Kennedy made his
appearance. He stood on a dining room chair so everyone could see
him and cracked the crowd up with his opening line:

"I've always wanted to give a speech at a cocktail party."


He said he knew he had neglected them by not inviting them before
but "we've been saving you for just this occasion." After the food
and drink came the business end of the stick in the East Room behind
closed doors. A Washington lawyer took the podium and asked for
pledges. Two tables for this company, three for that one and the hall
was sold out in a half hour. The New York Times got hold of the
story and the story's headline the day after the dinner played upon
the popularity of the popular gyrating dance called the Peppermint
Twist: "Arm Twisting at the White House."
After the President died the National Cultural Center became the
John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
My short life as savior of the Cleveland Orchestra could be
confirmed by Hank Greenberg, the great baseball slugger, if Your
Excellencies wouldn't mind locating him around here.

He was

general manager of the Cleveland Indians when I convinced him that

73

the Indians could perform a fine public service and make an


enormous publicity coup by parking the temporarily homeless
symphony orchestra in center field for pre-game concerts. Public
Hall, where they usually played, was being air conditioned. I met
him when I was a reporter on the Cleveland News, the Plain Dealer's

now demised p.m. sister, but not through a sports connection.


Improbably, I met the first genuine contender for Babe Ruth's home
run record at.what must be described as a cultural event. Greenberg,
who could hit a tennis ball a zillion miles per hour now that he could
no longer produce home runs, was a self-made man who would
proudly state that he never read books.

He was a huge, amiable

guy with no pretensions, but he and his wife, department store


heiress Caral Gimbel, couldn't resist invitations from their lively
professor neighbor one mansion away on South Park Boulevard,
Horace Rigg. Horace was our mutual friend and a man of many
enthusiasms. One of those, luckily, was the Cleveland Orchestra,
which in the early fifties under George Szell. was arguably the best
symphony orchestra in the United States. When Berl Senofsky, one
of the stars in the violin section, announced at a Riggs cocktail party
that he might not come back for the next season because there was
no chance for a summer season with the hall being refurbished, our
whole group went into a tailspin. If Berl, married to a first rate
cellist in the orchestra and without children, could not afford not to
work during the summer, chances were that many others in the
orchestra would disperse because they had to make a living.

74

I finally hit on the sacrilegious thought that there was another first
rate Cleveland institution that was going full blast during the
summer--the Cleveland Indians--which could surely use some use a
series of pop concerts as an extra added attracton. Who better than
the orchestra? The musicians voted for it. It took quite some time to
get together my paper, the Musical Arts Association, which
administered the orchestra, and the Cleveland local of the American
Federation of Musicians, which has a performance fund. But the
deal was finalized. I was acclaimed as a public hero, and the day the
orchestra was informed that it was all settled they were jubilant.
Free seats to the games besides being paid for the summer. At
rehearsal that afternoon, when Maestro Szell gave the downbeat, the
Orchestra went into "Take Me Out To The Ball Game." According to
Senofsky he had never seen Szell puzzled at the podium until that
minute. The great musician had never heard the hymn to baseball.
The musicians really went overboard after that. They took up a
collection to buy us two bicycles, for we had decided after the sixth
and last miscarriage that if we weren't going to have children, we
were just going to take a year's sabbatical and travel the cheapest
possible way through Europe. We weren't even present to accept the
accolades and enjoy the first concert. Too busy. We were booked
that day on the Empress of Scotland from Montreal to Llverpool.
When I think about that blasted cancer , or even about all those
blasted cancers, I still keep telling myself how lucky I've really been.
That year in Europe was one of the best things we ever arranged for

75

ourselves. Yes, we did write, both of us, and yes, we earned enough
to cover our costs, especially since, when we got tired and the
weather was really bad up north we rented a villa in Positano from
December through February for $35 a month, including maid service.
By that time we had given up the bikes in favor of Llesl's father prewar British Ford Prefect, which was always developing an airlock,
and somebody had to blow into the exhaust pipe to break the
vacuum. Come to think of it, Llesl looked good even with a black ring
around her mouth whenever we had to drive somewhere. One or
both of us had to blow that Prefect out of trouble on some of the
busiest locales in Europe and some of the spookiest. We were stalled
for an hour directly in front of the Pope's see as the Bishop of Rome,
the church of San Giovanni Laterani, with two squad cars of policei
re-routing traffic and flirting with the pretty signora. One night in
absolute darkness of the back roads of the Abruzzi 10 people came
down the mountain by candlelight to kibbitz, scaring the hell out of
us. So what am I bellyaching about? I've had a good life so far. And
godamn it, it isn't going to end just yet.
Cozumel Airport, Noon, Tuesday, May 5
Ah, last night! 80 degrees with a tropical breeze and a half moon
just off our balcony. It was our final night in Cozumel and to make it
all perfect a little testosterone even managed to smuggle its way
cleverly past the Lupron. Look, ma, no Viagra! It was an evening
when, you might say, everything came together.

76
I am writing these words from the airport on the floor of the lounge
at Gate A waiting for the overdue plane that is to take us part of the
way home, to Houston. My back is against the wall and my legs are
stretched out. My Mac Power Book is on my lap and its power cord
snakes into a Mexican government-owned wall plug. Liesl frowns on
my ungainly sprawl and sits reading about 10 yards away. The old
cleaning lady, mop in hand, sloshes by every 10 minutes or so and
flirts. Why do I sit here in such discomfort? Because the Mac's
battery won't hold a charge, that's why.
Will I hold a charge any more? Is the testosterone really drying up?
How will I think? Who doesn't know that the cock rules the head?
When I was going to grade school in Jersey City in the 20's sex
education started on the way to school with glimpses of the other
kids' crude pornographic Jiggs and Maggie and Popeye and Olive Oyl
comic strips done up as pamphlets that could be easily hidden. It
continued with the discovery that sitting in the back of the bumpy
Bergen Avenue bus raised hard-ons and not even the threat of hair
growing on your palms nor the well-thumbed discreet warning about
Conservation in the Boy Scout Handbook could stop these couriers
from the swift completion of their appointed rounds. "Don't care if I
do die, dooo die, dooooo dieeeee!" Sex got a lot more companionable
after that, but it was always there. If it doesn't come back will I be
the same guy without it?

Thursday, May7

77

Dr. Banfield asked me to drop in for a briefing about next


Wednesday's bladder operation, which has me in a tailspin. I simply
detest the idea of going under the knife under these circumstances.
He has discussed the operation in detail with all of his office
colleagues and with Dr. Connally and they are all in agreement. The
only option to the partial cystectomy he's planning would be an eight
hour operation to remove the entire bladder and the prostate, a
radical radical radical which would require me to go through the rest
of my life with a urine bag at my waist. Llesl says, and I agree, that
this is no real option. If I reach that necessity it might be a good
idea to cut Medicare's national losses by deciding that living may no
longer be worthwhile.
Sibley can advertise: "Two Surgeons No Waiting" for my two hour
surgical production. like a barber shop. Just Banfield and me and
Lailas makes three. Banfield lowballs the complexity of the job he
has to do, describing the operation simple step by simple step as if I
were getting do-it-yourself instructions at Sears for building a coffee
table. But first he applies the soft soap: "You're a surgeon's dream,
Mr. Wittenberg. You're in great shape and you're not fat." To me, as

he diagrams it, once again on a prescription form--and I hope he's a


whole lot better at surgery than he is at drawing-- it looks like an
early draft of the plan for the Yale-Princeton football game of 1958
which he must have attended as a Princeton senior.

78
Because a section of that carcinogenic diverticulum runs along part of
the bladder wall and adheres to it, he plans for safety's sake to take
a deep cut out of my healthy bladder muscle as well. Doctor, doesn't
that leave me deprived? A urological Shylock exacting a half pound
of flesh? But this doctor has great confidence in the human bladder.
"It's an amazing organ,"Mr. Wittenberg. It regenerates! It gets itself
together in no time. And there isn't even much bleeding."
I'll be getting an epidural injection plus an N general anesthetic.
Totally conked out. The incision will run from the navel to the
pubis--about six inches.
Tuesday, May 12
I'm getting too experienced at going to the hospital. I check in
tomorrow at noon and my kit, with toilet articles, reading material
and battery-shy laptop are fully packed and ready. Can't say,
however, that I am. My belly is going to be sliced to get at the culprit
and I don't like that at all. Keep thinking that it might have been
avoided with earlier detection of the cancer in that weird
diverticulum. I find myself getting angry that it needed a full scale
MRI to detect a tumor that doctors routinely can find with a
cystoscope in their very own offices. Dr. B. last explored it in
December 1994 and found zilch. That gave the cancer a three and a
half year head start without being checked, obviously enough time
for it to dig deep into the thin lining of the diverticulum and--we'll
find out after tomorrow's excavation-- maybe help itself to some of

79
the good bladder muscle as well. I'm impressed with the
regenerative powers of the bladder but I would be much more
impressed with having it intact without sutures and a six inch scar
from belly to pubis that I will have to admire every morning for the
rest of my life. Why in hell was it allowed to go unchecked for three
and a half years when I have come in regularly for a checkup every
six months? Dr. Banfield, who never ducks questions like this, says
the protocol calls for a five year cystoscopy. But still, that 22 year
old history and the trail of blood to Rio and back seems to indicate a
more frequent watch for cancer.
Liesl and I are having a midnight dinner tonight with ahi, com on the
cob, a bottle of Mouton Cadet and a pint of Starbuck's Dark Roast
Espresso Swirl. Sounds like a scene from "The English Patient," a
veddy, veddy romantic parting. We accept that, but the real reason
for the late, late show was the doctor's pre-op instructions which
intended me to starve. No food after midnight, and the operation
isn't until 2 p.m. I'd make a terrible martyr, qveching all the way to
the gallows. "No rubber padding to prevent chafing of my neck by
the rope? The King will certainly hear about this!"
Tom Connally examined me late yesterday afternoon. Blood
pressure: 130/70. Pulse: 56. Heart behaving. He said I was in great
shape and would come through this fine. Shook my hand and said
he'd stop by and visit me at Sibley. These two guys, Drs. C. & B.,
practice a rapidly disappearing brand of medicine. They are closely
involved with the patient. I found Banfield first and when the

80

internist who sent me to him suddenly decided in a strange moment


of enlightenment to give up his practice and take a clinical post in
Islamabad, Banfield recommended me to his own doctor, Tom
Connally. Their practices are entirely unconnected and it is
flattering, not to mention reassuring, to know that they keep each
other up to date on my assorted krankheits by phone. No thank
you, HMOs. I'd rather do it myself. But there is still some rankling in
my head about the length of time this cancer was allowed free rein i
If I didn't feel so warm towards Landon Banfield I think I might

have consulted a lawyer.


This has been the crappiest week in May that I can remember. Not
for my own troubles. It's been raining ever since we got back from
Cozumel and promises not to clear up until Thursday when I'll be
able to admire it from a window in the surgical ward. Totally
unprepared for the rain this morning, even after looking out the
window and seeing it soak the ground, Liesl and I left for a matinee
at the Arena Stage without rain gear. Arrived soggy to see a social
comedy with music called "Black No More," which supposes what
would happen to the race problem in the United States if a machine
could change the color of all but a few African Americans. It is
brightly performed and cleverly staged and directed, but almost
three hours of the single joke can wear out even the most
enthusiastic theater audience, whose name happens to be Liesl. The
operation is scheduled for 2 p.m. tomorrow. No food after midnight.
Wednesday, May 13

81
I personally got my operation off to a late start with a goofy craving
Why not have a bagel and a cup of coffee when we woke up at 7?
Why not? There turned out to be a very good and expensive reason
not to indulge in a little cheating on the rules. The instruction sheet
didn't say why the chow line had to end at midnight, leaving room
for a little scatterbrained theorization on the side. The midnight rule
must apply, I reasoned, to operations done in the morning. When we
checked in at Sibley one of the pre-op questions threw the monkey
wrench and I wasn't fast enough to lie.
"When was the last time you ate?"
"Seven."
"Ooops. I can't send you to the OR until three. Hospital rules. No
food allowed within eight hours of the schedule operation." But what
about the cast of thousands? The Two Surgeons, No Waiting, with
plenty of other work to do, in the house and preparing right now to
make the first of a number of delicate incisions? The time of the
chief urologic resident, the anesthetist, all the masked assistants that
have bit parts in operations in the movies, the recovery room
personnel, not to mention the downtime of the OR itself. Banfield,
whose time is measured precisely in minutes, looked pissed, to use a
in urological term, when I finally was wheeled into the OR but the
hospital personnel who had to be on duty anyhow said cheerful
things like "It's not the first time." and "Don't worry about it."

82

The team wasted no time. The epidural anesthesia, knocking out


feeling in the lower half of the body, was delivered to one of my
lumbar vertebrae as I bowed forward slightly on command on the
operating table. It was supplemental to the N, added to assure
additional post op protection from miserable bladder spasms. I was
asleep in an instant when the N, inserted through my left hand, took
over.
I was on the table for 3 1/2 hours while my bladder was being
sculpted with deep cuts and I awoke in the recovery room with two
rows of neatly stitched metal staples holding my skin together and
two drains out of my bladder, plus oxygen nose tubes helping me to
breathe. . My head was heavy from the anesthesia and I really
wasn't interested in anything when I was carted off to the sixth floor
and my new home from home, 636 B. I had the window and was the
sole occupant of the semi-private room.
Thursday, May 14
Banfield was at the foot of my bed at 7:30 a.m., snazzy in a blue suit,
white shirt and a Brooks Brothers yellow and blue striped tie. He
lives an hour's drive away on an isolated farm deep in the hills of
otherwise sprawling and overurbanized Montgomery County.
Regards it as one of the triumphs of modem life that he can't see the
property of his nearest neighbor. He reviewed the visible carvings
on the road map of what he had called a "virgin belly" just before the

83

operation. Then he pumped empty the two drains that catheterize


my bladder directly through customized holes in my gut and changed
the dressing. Sorry, old buddy down there left without any
functions left to perform. Maybe better days are coming.
Tom Connally missed Banfield by 10 minutes, a smaller, more casual
fashion plate in a sport jacket. He's got the job of monitoring the
third of the unholy trinity of curses visited upon me. They're all
calling it chronic myelomonocytic leukemia to my face now and I
think I had better start facing it too. Could kill me in 15 years. At a

few months before 78 do I really have to consider something 15


years ahead? Doesn't need any treatment; just watching for signs of
it showing its own personality.
He took my pulse for a long time while telling me the equivalent of
"The Bronx is up and the Battery's down." The white blood cells are
way high. That's bad. And the red blood cells are down. That's bad
too. Anemia. Got to get a new supply of RBCs in there.
Dan lives only a mile from Sibley so Janet and the three kids made a
quick sick call after school. Jamie, our 9-year-old civil rights lawyer,
presented me with a blue posterboard reading: "Sign This Petition If
You Want Grandpa To Get Better!" She managed to get 100 % of her
precinct which gave me a significantly better chance of survival than
the ailing CEO of a big industrial plant who had just gone through a
bruising labor negotiation. He got a telegram at the hospital reading:
"By a vote of 326 to 154, the officers and members of Local 724 of

84

the Amalgamated Workers Union, AFL- CIO, wish you a speedy


recovery. " Jamie also seems to have gotten some of the old Jersey
City Hague machine politics into her genes. She even voted the two
beloved family dogs, Sheena and Margie, from their graves deep in
the backyard.
Friday, May 15.
Dr. Dalar, an anesthesiologist, made some notes in my chart about
the post-operative pain killers meant to head off those terrible
spasms advertised in advance to go with bladder operations.
Described me as "very sleepy," and "easily arousable" "wife
concerned" "Patient on valium of 8% and taking benedril and
phenergan pm." "somnolence probably due valium which has very
long half life. Will decrease doses until patient more alert." But it
was too late. All of these factors plus the anemia had already let the
monster get off Frankenstein's table.
636 became a vast stage with endless players and plots. I told Liesl
that we had made a dreadful mistake. in coming here. We weren't
supposed to be here. The sixth floor of Sibley wasn't part of the
hospital at all. It was the headquarters of an institute for
experimentation, run by God knows who.. We never should have
paid the $177 registration fee. Dan became alarmed when I pulled
the equivalent of Elwood P. Dowd introducing his six foot rabbit
friend Harvey. While talking to him, I referred to Liesl as if she
were sitting right over there and she wasn't even in the room or the
hospital. The patients were being organized for a field trip and when

85
we got back from the picnic on the lake everybody moved into 636.
There were five of us inside and four more, including Llesl, in cots on
the balcony. But 636 had no balcony. So what had they done with
Llesl in the middle of the night? "Nurse, where's my wife?" "She
went home." "She couldn't have gone home without telling me." "She
went home," the attendant said firmly. I could hear Dan's voice in
conversation with another roommate but I didn't try to talk with
him. Lying in bed trying to unravel this horrid plot I looked upward,
eyeballs rolled into the upper lids. A blinding flash was followed by a
fast spinning, shining silver disc which reflected my face. It whirled
faster and faster. And I was turning with it. at its speed. I knew
this was a crisis point. I grimaced and said with as much will as I
could muster: "This is unacceptable!" The Disc came and went three
times and was gone. All this was a test for the night staff, large,
gentle African women trained in restraint who were deeply involved
in the plot. 636 wasn't a room in a hospital. It was a room in a
private house where I was being held. That door, which was cracked
open from time to time by a person peering at me, led to a hall and
there the night watch constantly drank coffee. and chatted in low
tones. There seemed to be no escape. When I remained out of
control they installed an electronic bed check which made a racket
when I as much as put one foot over the side of the bed. The women
showed up in twos. "Where are you going?" "I'm going to the
bathroom." "You can use a bedpan." Gentle restraint. Next time:
"Where are you going?" "To get a magazine." A litle rougher. "You
don't want a magazine. You want to sleep." Their final solution to
the tumult that had no other end game was to drag into the room a

86

lean way back arm chair like a lazee-Boy and get me on it,
immobilized only by my inability to force the chair forward. They
hauled the trophy into the corridor, which had been the gang's coffee
area a few minutes back and parked it just outside my room. My
eyes had to keep looking at the room number:636 Wittenberg,
Ernest.. I couldn't work it out. I listened suspiciously at the door
and thought I could still hear Dan's voice.
I was in coventry, chilly and disgraced, trying to make eye contact
with the hospital staff people passing through. My captors ignored
me and, if anything, managed hostile looks. I kept time on my wrist
watch and at 5 a.m. spoke out forcefully at an oncoming James
Montgomery Flagg vision of a nurse with crisp, starched creases of
her stripe-bordered white cap
"Are you a supervising nurse?"
"Yes."
"I've been punished here for more than 3 1/2 hours and that should
be enough. I want to go back to my room."
"You're not being punished, sir," she cooed soothingly. "And you can
go right back in."
The instant I was back in the B slot I picked up the phone and called
home. There was still the question of what had become of Liesl.

87

"Ernie! It's 5:30 in the morning.!"


"You're safe. You're at home."
"Yes dear. Sleep well."
Saturday, May 16
Dr. Banfield defines the phenomenon that I am mad but north
northwest as "sundowning," which has that great British Empire
sound to it. Retired to Anguilla, the fading leftenant colonel sits
clutching his whiskey and soda looking vacantly at the sea past a
coconut tree into his 4,352d perfect sunset. Today his mind is gone
and maybe tomorrow a coconut will fall on his head ending the third
act. The play will never make it out of Weston-Super-Mare but my
doctor's definition is a little less blood flowing to all organs in the
elderly, and a shortfall of oxygen to my brain in particular I now
wear oxygen nose tubes.
But if I am fading fast what do I make of the vegetable that turned
up in 636A this morning while I was sleeping off my wild
adventures. The first sounds I heard were from my new room mate.
"Hello," he called lyrically, just above a whisper. "Hello. Is anyone
here? Is anyone here?" When I acknowledged that I was indeed

88

there he ignored me and went right on like a parrot. "Hello, Hello. Is


anyone here? Is anyone here?"
He was a rotund little man, pink and white, with a soft white halo of
hair. He had been a minister with a full career in the military before
going on to his own church in the Washington area.. He still had the
polite and pleasant way of addressing the world though he was
swaddled in diapers and there was a hand scrawled sign over his bed
saying: Feed slowly and check for food retained in the cheeks.. The
11

Alzeimer that he had had for six years had suddenly attacked his left
eye and cheek and the question for Sibley's doctors was whether it
was a progression of the old disease or whether he had suffered a
stroke.
During the night he took my place on the Lazee-boy outside the room
because he kept on tripping the electronic bed check and climbing
overboard. Question: How can I get well in a place where I might be
seeing my future lying next to me? The only problem was that he
was exactly my age.
The debate about whether I should get that extra pint of blood which
could banish spinning disks is over. Two technicians arrived late this
afternoon and between them pricked my hand 40 times by count
before deciding that they were not the ones to return to the lab with
samples for matching and testing. They told me that another, greater
person would arrive within the hour with a steadier hand and a good

89

jump shot. She did, a very competent, assured lady, and the drawing
of blood was over in less than a minute.
But the transfusion, ah, that was a ballet. I was awoken just before
midnight by the crew charged with setting it up. They were directed
by a tall, gorgeous nurse with a commanding manner. As they
moved through this slo-mo routine I twice checked the date and time
on my watch against the calendar and clock on the wall to be sure I
was in real time. When everything was in place, a handsome face in
a blue cap moved in very close. The gorgeous nurse said, the best I
could get out of it, "This is Dr. Mago." With the entire crew leaning in
like the students in Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson" Dr. Mago
connected the two needles that started the flow and, of course, joined
the Southern Pacific and the Union Pacific to give America railroad
service right across the continent.
In the morning the Alzheimer's daughter arrived, an ebullient
woman in her middle forties, a free lance landscape gardener. Her
mission, besides cheering him up and taking over the feeding
spoonful by spoonful was to see if she could get for him a virtually
unavailable spot in the full care section of the nursing home. He was
now getting assisted living there and she was moving heaven and
earth to get her dad the best. She had an imaginative part time
solution in mind. While there would be a wait for a place in the full
care, she was going to take him back into the assisted living and she
would provide a full time night nurse for all the crevices. She did all
this while giving Liesl in how to successfully garden in a western

90
exposure balcony: the plants that could stand three weeks of
absence of the caretaker.
Wednesday, May 20
The hospital checkout bill was for $13.75 and they took VISA. This
small change was just for the TV. And with a tab that must be
counted in five figures when you include the surgeons' bills floating
around in limbo somewhere between health agencies , Sibley staff
was very cheerful about letting me go as I was wheelchaired to the
driveway to catch the 10:30 a.m. Llesl.
I've never even had to think once about affording all this highly
specialized medical and surgical care that has now been provided for
me by the best there is over a period of months, and will go on. I
don't even have to argue with the providers if their bills seem out of
line. There's an agency somewhere nearby hired by Medicare to do
that for me What did I ever do to get this first class, free from
worry service? For one thing I have attained a great age and paid
into my Social Security for more than 40 years before deciding to
start using it. Every January the Social Security System sends me a
statement telling me how much will be withheld monthly to cover
my mandatory Medicare insurance premiums. The total for this year
is $0000 which covers payment of 80% of the approved Medicare
bills I run up. The other 20% comes from a private insurance
company in Chicago that Llesl and I each pay another $0000 to close
the Medigap. Brilliant, no?

91

The term for all this is intergenerational transfer, which drives


responsible baby boomers up the wall and makes them wonder who
is shuffling the deck.

They are not ready to push grandma's

wheelchair over a cliff, but poll after poll finds that very few believe,
Danny among them, that there will be anything left in the pot when
they are on the receiving end of this transfer. Naturally, I want my
sons and grandkids to get everything I'm getting and more. But not
to worry! It's too important for politicians to ignore and each
generation is going to find the political muscle to improve the
system, not dump it. Tip O'Neill, the Massachusetts sage who was
Speaker of the House, called Social Security "the third rail of
American politics. Touch it and you die!" Translation: It is an
overheated subject and doesn't stand up very well to open debate,
though remarkably everybody is now debating it fiercely.
My constituency, the aged, for example, scream "Assassin!" at the
first sign that someone may be concealing a a scalpel that could cut
the "entitlements." Then they threaten to use our awesome voting
power to disfigure the face of Congress at the next election
Today, as should be remembered by all true fans of "My Fair Lady,"
is Eliza Doolittle Day, as in the king's vocal promise that "Each year on
the 20th of May, I proclaim Eliza Doolittle Day." And of course on
that very special day he is happy to do her the small favor of
executing the beastly Henry Higgins. Why I remembered Eliza this
morning during my smug reveries on how well Medicare works for

92

me was that I recalled that I had once been hospitalized in London


under its Cradle to Grave care system, once often booed and reviled
in the U.S. as Socialized Medicine.
I liked it fine. It was 1953, three months after Queen Elizabeth's
coronation. Emergency health care was free for visitors to the
country and I qualified with a still undiagnosed bicycle injury on the
arch of my right foot. It was a painful large red splotch that I
acquired toward the end of a three month bike trip through Norway,
Sweden and Denmark. We sold the bikes and ferried back to London
for treatment.
The ward was not exactly cozy or exclusive. It had 28 beds run by
two shifts of nurses: a sister, two staff nurses and two probationers.
The doctors made daily rounds, but my lasting memory of the
hospital was of a gregarious Cockney named Bert whose bed was
opposite mine and spent all bis time pontificating and poking into
everyone's business. He spoke in Rhyming Slang. It was the first
time I had been exposed to it and it took a lot of translation. I
understood that your Trouble and Strife was your wife and had no
trouble With Apples and Pears (Upstairs). I picked up quickly on
Raspberry Tart (fart) but when he invoked the "four by twos" and
sometimes "two by twos" it took some doing to get me to understand
that he was referring to the Chosen People, "The Jews!"
Years later The New York Times had a Page One feature about the
growth of the London theater, quoting a colorful West End producer.

93
"It's like magic," he said. "Every night it attracts thousands of two by
twos." The reporter might have used a short course with Bert.
Thursday, May 21
Awoke at home, Liesl beside me with that fabulous morning
greeting smile. Kissed. She's been so spectacular during the hospital
period and now she's rewarded by being in charge of the mopping
up.process for an oozing patient with two tubes sticking out of his
belly, one of them leading to a urine bag. I've been assigned to a
month or so of rest and recovery through Lieslcare, a very exclusive
service that i was lucky enough to sign up for 53 years ago. I felt an
enormous well of emotion toward her and decided that this
homecoming must be marked with a special occasion. I riffled
through the restaurants I knew and decided upon Le Refuge, a
postage stamp in downtown Alexandria with an absolutely romantic
setting and a widely varied menu of delicious French dishes. Sa
cave! Sa cuisine! There also had to be a very special, very personal
present. I had been looking for a starfish for months, poring over
black coral jewelry in Fiji and shells in Samoa. The key was in the
star, not the fish. Liesl was a girl in Vienna when the movie
"Broadway Melody of 1936" arrived. It was her first grown up
movie. It worked an electric effect on her, particularly the song "You
Are My Lucky Star." Full of life, full of hope, full of fun. It's her
theme song.

94
To help the party get under way sooner, the starfish miraculously
appeared too, illustrated with one rakishly curled tentacle, in a small
ad from a Newport jeweler in the back pages of The New Yorker. I
recognized it promptly as what I had been looking for and acted
immediately on the 800 number. This starfish was to be in gold and
delivered without delay. I covered my tracks by telling Llesl I was
expecting a package of software from UPS. Dinner date depends
upon when it arrives.
Monday, May 25
The starfish, as elegant as promised, showed up this morning and its
debut came at 7:30 p.m. at Le Refuge, which surpassed itself in
providing the perfect scene. We did in a full bottle of white
burgundy, canard for me and grouper for she, and cooed. If it
hadn't been for the handicap of Lupron and Casodex cancelling out
the testosterone, plus all the depressing hardware around my
middle, things might have gotten even a little closer. Formidable
competition, but serene night all around, except for that determined
microscopic robot that controls the Lupron daily time release. He
never sleeps.
Tuesday, May 26.
Long visit with Banfield. He didn't remove tubing left in bladder
because there was still some oozing. Wants to wait until wounds are
fully closed Will probably have to go to Reston to have it done by

95

Lailas next week because B. is going to San Diego for a medical


convention. "What did you leave in there?" I asked innocently to get
a line on why my middle feels so heavy. "Oh, just a couple of
retractors and a pair of gloves." Nobody talks about my Gleason 8
any more. "You've reached your forgotten Gleason 8. I'm on hold
now, studying my next moves, but I hate to be ignored.

Press 2 if

you'd like a new diagnosis. Press S if you know who Dr. Gleason was.
Press 8 if you're getting tired of all these fucking illnesses and want
to scream." No schedule yet for the seeding and can't do any
planning for the summer until some kind of date is set.
Monday, June 1:
Ran into Ski this morning. He is looking better than he had but his

cancer is much worse than mine His Gleason 8 broke out of its
capsule and he had to have the 40 session full radiation treatment.
Five times a week for eight weeks. As a good Catholic he has a saint
for all occasions. For cancer he has St. Peregrine, a 18th century
Italian monk martyr who developed a cancer on his leg. Ski says he
will include me in his prayer group even though I won't come.

Phone call from Dr. K's office sets date for implantation as Tuesday,
July 28 at 10 a.m. This frees our summer schedule for definite plans.
My obsession with knowing more about Dr. Gleason moved ahead a
little today. The Alexandria library plugged him into a computer
search for me and turned up "Donald F. Gleason, born 1920, U.S.

96
pathologist." Could be, but certainly not a sure thing. I gave this
information for further investigation to a reference librarian at
Georgetown University School of Medicine. Her first thought: "1920?
He couldn't be alive." As penance, she ran him through a medical
biography search and came up with "born in Iowa, graduated from
University of Minnesota Medical School and chief pathologist,
Veterans Administration Hospital, Minneapolis. Retired as chief
pathologist Fairview Hospital, Minneapolis."
Very likely my man, but still no mention of prostate. I started to
picture him with his background as a man who would stay pretty
dose to home in retirement and bored to distraction with the thought
of moving to Florida. I called Minneapolis information and there was
indeed a Donald F. Gleason listed. I jotted down his number and just
stared at it.
Wednesday, June 3
Lailas took the tube out of my belly, which put the bladder and all
accessories down there on notice that they are entirely on their own.
He warned me with emphasis that the bladder's return to activity
after about a month of nothing at all to do could result in an urgent
message to get to the bathroom immediately. The bladder would pop
back to its old shape, or at least the way it was left at the end of the
operation and its first contraction could be urgent. He had me so
convinced I might get this urge while driving home through Rock
Creek Park and wouldn't be able to pull over that I asked Liesl to

97
drive., which terrifies me even more. I sat in the passenger's seat
apprehensively holding an enormous bottle that the doctor had
provided me with. Well, we neither had a flood emergency in the
Honda nor an accident. Then, maybe three hours later, I felt a slight,
polite urge to try out the overhauled equipment and I was delighted
with the test drive. The flow was instantaneous and continuous,
assurances that the old bladder never could provide. In the old days
I had to negotiate and coax to get it going and keep it going and
when I was finished only about 1/3 of the bladder was empty.
There is still one foreign item left inside. It is called a stint, a metal
catheter which protected my left ureter during the operation. It has
curls at each end which link the kidney and the bladder. It will be
plucked out via cystoscopy on Monday, June 29 at 2p.m. It will not
bother me in the meantime. He stressed what a big operation I have
had, once again, and this time indicated that the tumor was
absolutely huge--being about 3 1/2 inches by 2 inches and that
there were four diverticula emanating from the bladder, all of which
had to be eliminated, and the tumor had already invaded the rear
wall of the bladder. They took out all the cancerous material, he

said, and there should be no recurrence.


Friday, June S
I've stared at that Minneapolis telephone number every day this
week without doing anything about it. Today I picked up the phone
and dialled. 10 rings and then a lively recorded message, probably

98

by the great man himself. "Congratulations, you have reached the


Gleasons ........." I left a detailed message. Is it really him? And will
he really call back?
Saturday, June 6
Ski called this morning to report on the sighting of another of the
walking wounded in our neighborhood, making him wonder but not
seriously if prostate cancer is contagious. The new member is a
neighbor familiarly called Jonesy and his Gleason rating is 6, not the
caliber of mine and Ski's but certainly respectable. Jonesy said he
had attended a meeting of one of the support groups. What happens
there, according to him, is that each person present tells the story of
his own prostate cancer. Then everyone has coffee and cookies and
goes home. Ski told him it sounded like Alcoholics Anonymous.
I am happy to report that St. Peregrinus Laziosi is now working on
my case. He has been anglicized to Peregrine as in falcon, but the
Book of Saints should know what to call him for a proper prayer.
Peregrinus is the patron saint of cancer patients and Ski consults him
every morning. This morning his prayer included me. I am very
touched by this act Peregrinus was certainly no saint during his
youth. He got into fights, lived a worldly life and scoffed at
Christianity. During one of his escapades, however, he slapped the
wrong person across the face. It was St. Philip Benizi and
instantaneously with the slap he was converted and joined a holy
order. His connection with cancer? As an old monk he had a large

99
growth on his foot. One night he awoke to a religious vision and by
morning the cancer had disappeared. Dr. Banfield should learn this
type of surgery. Much less wearing on the patient.
Tuesday, June 9
He returned my call. I found him. I found the eponymous Dr.
Gleason, the household name in prostate cancer households.

This is

Dr. Donald F. Gleason, the Veterans Administration pathologist who


graded the tumors by their danger to the patient in the 1970's and
has lived to see his system sweep the country and the world. He is
alive and well and living happily in Minneapolis at age 77.

He is

very modest about his achievement. We talked on the phone for an


hour this morning. "Right place at the right time," he says, but he
can put his finger exactly on the reasons that tumors are called
Gleasons today rather than by the names of the many other
researchers who had introduced systems. The keys were simplicity
and a drawing he made to illustrate the stages of cancer.
One afternoon in 1972 Gleason got a phone call from Dr. George
Mellinger, the chief urologist at the Minnesota VA hospital, who had
just been named chairman of a study planned by the urologists in
20 VA hospitals across the country with a funding pittance. They
called themselves the VA Cooperative Urological Group.
"Don, can you grade tumors?" Mellinger asked.

100
"Sure," Gleason joked. "Small, medium and large."
He started by examining the slides of 250 cases of prostate cancer
that had been in his hospital in the past year. He assigned gradation
numbers rather than verbal descriptions to each case, deciding that
\

words would be prejudicial and confusing when one pathologist told


another about what he had seen. The numbers ranged from one, the
least dangerous, to 10-- predictable death. He sent his results to the
National Institutes of Health in Bethesda where the Gleason ratings
could be checked by statisticians against the case histories on a six
month and one year follow-up. Those veterans with high ratings had
died. The lower ratings had survived. The study was on the right
track.
When his colleagues asked him to be the chief pathologist of the
study and teach the gradings to other pathologists, Gleason came up
with his masterwork, the famous illustration that hangs in many
urologists' offices around the country. On a single sheet he copied
from graded slides continuous change from two to five and sat over
the shoulder of the artist who perfected it. To obtain a Gleason grade,
pathologists were required to choose and add two numbers that
came closest to the cancer slide they were working with. So my
Gleason 8 was either two fours or a five and a three. It gave
pathologists a common language in which to discuss the tumors.
After some 2,000 cases from the 20 VA hospitals came pouring in,
Gleason wrote a medical journal article discussing his findings and
making the system available to physicians everywhere.

101

As it became almost universal in the United States and spread to


Japan and France and Italy, the Gleason system also developed
enemies, principally other researchers with other gradings. It was
ridiculed as being oversimplified, and as the criticism grew the
shakier the VA became as the sponsor, contributing $1 million to the
research at its peak. Eventually the funding was withdrawn and the
VA Cooperative Urological Group dwindled to nothing. A grand
summary of the study was never written. All that remained was the
well accepted Gleason scale.
Dr. Gleason retired from the VA the day after his 56th birthday and
moved a few blocks down the street to the private Fairview Hospital
where he was chief pathologist for another 10 years. He and Nancy,
his wife of 5 2 years, are happily surrounded by three daughters and
nine grandchildren. And no, no Gleason number has ever been
added to his name.
He enjoys being an eponym in the classic dictionary definition: "A
person whose name has become identified with some period,
movement or theory." His name has outpaced him. Donald F. Gleason
is in a class with Ohm, Bunsen, Roentgen, and Fahrenheit as names
that have become part of the language. (Lies! was once jolted out of
a catnap in nursing school when the sister tutor spoke of the
thermometer invented by Dr. Centigrade.) With one in every five
males developing prostate cancer and with 40,000 men dying of it
each year--all of these people having a Gleason rating--the good

102
doctor's achievement should be memorialized in capsule form with a
dictionary definition. I'll write suggestions to a few editors.
Thursday, June 10
Saw Royal Shakespeare Company's awesome Hamlet. Took one lousy
little nap and missed the soliloquy. Very bad timing.
Friday, June 11
Big day. Granddaughter Alex graduated from 5th grade. Naturally
we drove over to Bethesda to show the flag. Sweet kid. She and I
have an email correspondence going that covers everything from
Romeo and Juliet to lost toys. When I kissed her goodbye she said,
"Grandpa, I hope what you have is better." Now that kind of support
will help a man lick the whole world.

Thursday, June 18
Hey, the Shaws have invited us "plus one grandchild" to spend a
week with them beginning July 6 at their home on Bowen Island, a
quick ferry trip from Vancouver, B.C. Great stuff! We were in on
choosing the date. It's the period just before I become radioactive
and not suitable company for people under 18. We've been to
Bowen over and over again but we never get tired of being with
Daphne and Jim. Jim is a retired British Columbia judge who is called
upon to work more than half of his time because of the impossible

103
case backup in the courts. We picked them up or vice versa five
years ago on an Elderhostel trip to China and we've been doing home
and home visits ever since. Daphne, a large, fair lady almost six feet
tall and with admirable poise, held a large class of Beijing
kindergartners in awe as she moved down the line in a wide
brimmed hat, pausing before each child for a handshake, smile and
"Nee How'' as if she were the queen presenting awards for
distinguished service.
The "plus one" will be David Wittenberg, Pete's 13-year-old son.
How do you choose one of five? Well, he's our oldest, so presumably
easier to handle. He's the exact age of Joshua, the Shaw's shining
light who will also be there and, besides, David is no stranger. He has
been there before. No surprises. Just the ocean at the door,
mountain views that were once limited to Canadian Pacific
advertisements, kayaks galore and kids' picnics on a close-in
pachydermic island called Elephant Rock.
David is something of a computer geek who lets nothing get in his
way. Last week when a young house guest was closing in too much
on his space on the Internet, David got his freedom by rigging up the
family's other computer to be online. Only problem: He had to
convert the house's only voice telephone line and Pete got busy
signals far into the night when he tried to phone home from a
business trip.
Friday, June 19

104

Fadda's Day comes this weekend and with it a gentle breeze from
Missouri. Peter Wittenberg arrives around midnight from St. Louis
to visit with the old man for a couple of days. I'm happy to report
that he didn't choose this treacly, artificial holiday of his own accord.
Boeing needs him in New York on Monday so he branched out . Good
move. The tie, whiskey and cigar manufacturers, who love to see
dads smile, had nothing to do with it. As a matter of fact Pete will be
back here again next weekend as he heads home. Double feature.
I'm sure that all this cancer made him think "I really ought to spend
some quality time with dad while he's still around" and that makes
sense. I'm all for quality time with Pete while I'm still around.
Maybe I can learn something new about running my Mac. He has
been giving me computer advice from Day One, about 10 years ago ,
and is very proud of my latterly acquired skills. I think I have a
great relationship with both of my sons, and I can't help but think
back a generation to mine with my dad. It was a short run. He was
gone when I turned 12.
Harry Wittenberg was a financial victim of Prohibition. He had

owned a liquor store in Jersey City since 1910 when he fled a shtetl
near a place called Mariampoler in Lithuania. In 1920, with a wife, a
10-year-old daughter and a son on the way in July, the government
declared his business illegal. He cashed in on the inventory, added it
to his savings and looked around for something else to do. A boom
stock market helped keep him afloat in the Roaring 20's and he

105

toured France and Germany solo in 1923, still not in any definitive
line of work. I have a photo postcard of him on the open top deck of
a Berlin tour bus wearing a straw hat. A family legend says that I
banged on the garage door for several days in a row after he left
crying "Garage, give me back my daddy!"
When he got back from Europe he invested in some lots in Florida
which were only two feet under water and when a man named
Diamond told him they should become partners in a pocketbook
factory in Weehawken, N.J. my dad moved us to a hillside flat
overlooking the new Lincoln Tunnel where it might have been
possible to see Diamond fleeing with another chunk of dad's savings.
When someone said it was a shame that Diamond was a crook, Dad
said: "That's not a shame. A shame is when a man stands by the
side of a car and pishes and the car goes away. That's a shame."
I don't know how we got from Weehawken to Astoria, Queens, less
than a year later but soon the family owned and was running a
general store on Steinway Avenue with naivete to make up for lack
of experience. It was in Astoria that I got a white poodle puppy I
named Jerry. My father would pace our apartment holding a glass of
Saratoga mineral water after a big meal. I followed in my father's
steps with my glass and Jerry dogged me. Jerry disappeared a
month after he arrived. My mother told me he had gotten lost. But a
couple of Saturday nights later, we had a reunion, Jerry and I. With
our store jammed with customers, in came Jerry on a leash followed

106

by a neighborhood Italian tradesman we all knew. "Heyf" he said.


"My wife no want-a this dog. He make-a too much-a shit!

11

The store lasted about a year and its demise coincided with the 1929
stock market crash. My dad held Anaconda Copper, which sank to
the depth of its own mines. We moved back to Jersey City where he
tried operating a malt and hops store, where all the materials and

equipment for making beer and wine were legally on sale. No go. I
once helped him affix "Golden Wedding" labels, some of them a little
tilted or with air bubbles, to a series of empty bottles. I never knew
the outcome of this project but it was a one timer. Finally, he got on
an even keel with a store selling house dresses on Jackson Avenue,
the very one that my mother kept going.
My dad was very proud of his club membership in the B.P.O.E., Best
People on Earth to the members and Benevolent and Protective Order
of Elks to the rest of a the world, where there are no ten commandments and a man can raise a thirst and play pinochle to his heart's
content, and the members call each other "Bill."

The official

greeting, demonstrating a broad coalition, went: "Episcopalian?" "No,


Presbyterian." "Shake, Brother Bill."
Harry Wittenberg ate too much and he smoked too much. I was on
his case about the tobacco and when I was alone with him in the
store I would hide his pack of cigarets. Didn't stop him for a
moment. He walked to the corner news store and bought them butt
by butt, a penny a piece. Rich food like kishka and his weakened

107
circulatory system caught up with him when he passed out at the
marvelous Canter's Restaurant on the same block as the store. The
ambulance crew used a stomach pump.
One day in August, 1932, when he had business in Manhattan he
took me with him to go to a movie. We had lunch in a cafeteria and
got tickets to the Criterion Theatre right on Times Square. The flick
was about a group of zombies on a recruiting campaign. When we
got home for dinner we annoyed mom by chanting the movie theme
over and over. "One of us, one of us. We will make you one of us."
"Go away with such stupidity!" she said. He had to go out for the
evening and I saw him only once after that, the next day in the
simple pine coffin at the funeral.
The cops came to the apartment with the news at 2 a.m. They
rounded up the three of us, Hazel, my mother and me, and said that
Dad had died a half block from home in a thunderstorm. He ran for
safety, taking shelter on a neighborhood porch. He keeled over from
a heart attack, fell down the porch steps and died. There were
bruises on his nose and cheeks.
In my worst moments I still can hear the terrible sound of the first

shovelfuls of dirt hitting the coffin. I've left binding orders for
cremation
Sunday, June 21

108
Pete, Llesl and I went to Dan and Janet's for lunch. Father's Day of
course. Danny was lying on the sofa reading a book. He gave me a
greeting card showing the head of the Statue of Liberty with a
desolate section of Jersey City in the background. But I'd have to
wait for the gift that went with it. He was only half way through the
book. It was a new biography of the eccentric publisher and
muscleman Bernarr McFadden, who was a couple of generations
ahead of the world with his physical fitness regime. As a boy, I
knew him as a mishugana who stood on his head, posed for a lot of
pictures with his muscles flexed and told subscribers how long it
should take them to read articles he published in Liberty Magazine.
Danny, who qualifies more than any of us as a physical fitness nut,
was thrilled to meet another one. He told me some of the things I
could expect to read when he finally relinquished the book.
Monday, June 22
There are some things I just don't need to know in this Information
Age, particularly as I am about to become radioactive when the
seeds are imbedded. For instance, I think I would have been better
off not learning today on the Internet that the company Dr. K.
ordered the seeds from underdosed a number of patients all over the
country by up to 100!6 in 1997. Ooops! The company, Theragenics
Corp. explained the public relations disaster as just a matter of poor
calibration of its instruments. There were many complaints and
order cancellations from hospitals and clinics.

109
I dropped in on the company website, reading the remarks of a
group of investors chatting about the problems and opportunities of
the Norcross, Georgia, company. The forum they were using had the
unfortunate pick-a-card, any-card title of Theragenics is on the up
and up. I had asked Dr. K's office for the name of the supplier,

hoping to learn more about shipping and handling radioactive


material. I got much more information about the financial side of the
company, and became concerned that to them the health of its stock
was more important than my health.
Theragenics has been a hot biomedical company with a couple of
cyclotrons. A lot of doctors, including Banfield, own its stock which
shot up from $16.25 in March 1997 to $45.25 in September because
it was on the leading edge of the new one-time radioactive seeding of
the prostate cancer. Demand for the rice-sized pellets of metal
palladium 103 in a one-time procedure that takes about an hour and
has far fewer side effects than the conventional treatments produced
company profits to dream about.
But recently Theragenics' shares took a hit. This week, the
underdosing of last year being long forgotten--except by me, some
new negatives turned up and Nasdaq quoted its shares at $23. One
of the original investors sold all of his 41,000 shares, the kind of
thing that always scares speculators, and the market was also
spooked, inexplicably, by the fact that one of Theragenics' suppliers,
a Belgian cyclotron company had gone public, claiming that it had a
Microsoft-sized share of the seed market, 90%.

110

Now all I want from Theragenics is honest weight, no springs, on


July 28 and seeds that don't require a public recall or apology after
they are installed in my prostate. I don't want to have to worry
about the company's future or past. I'm sorry I even know its
name. But next Monday when I have a checkup with Nick Lailas I'm
going to ask some questions about the underdosing and how he and
Dr. K. check on what arrives in that package from Georgia. I have
only one Gleason 8 to give for my country. I must be sure the deck
is not stacked against me. Is Nick going to quote Alexander Pope?
"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Drink deep or taste not of
the Pierian spring."
Tuesday, June 23
It was almost necessary for me to visit Liesl in a hospital today. She
took the Honda to the supermarket and, poof, the non Englishspeaking driver of a pickup truck crashed a red light and plowed into
her. The Honda wound up looking like an accordian but Liesl came
out of it like the champion she is. Properly seat belted, she had no
whip, no lash, no nothing. She was entirely poised for the interview
with the cops, who were there in a flash and cited the Latino for the
traffic violation. One negative about our equipment: the air bags did
not deploy. But since Liesl stands exactly five feet high, the latest
information about air bags suggests that she might have been
seriously injured if they had deployed.

111
She phoned me on the eel phone we keep in the car for just such
emergencies and never, ever use. And which I am supposed to keep
charged. Naturally, it was out of power. Am I alone in creating these
little idiocies that kick the shit out of the quality of life? She
managed to reach me on a pay phone and a neighbor drove me the
mile to the scene. Four cop cars. The Honda being lifted by the tow
truck. One cop directing traffic at the busy intersection. Another
interviewing the truck driver. And liesl, cool and calm, concerned
about the melting Starbucks ice cream in her shopping cart which sat
like street people's luggage in the parkway between the north and
south lanes of Van Dom Street. This was her first accident since she
got her driver's license in 1947. The truck driver, who was probably
about to be fired from his job, told the cop he got confused by the
lights. A taxi got us home and the ice cream was saved. Just needed
a little refreezing.
Wednesday, June 24
Our insurance company was on the ball. They hustled an estimator
over to the acres of great desolation that is Al Towing, toted up
$4300 in damages and had the Honda towed to the body shop of our
choice, authorized to start the repairs before this day was out. It will
take about three weeks. Meanwhile, we're in a rental Taurus which
gets added to the total bill the other guy's insurance will pay.
Sunday, June 28

112
Before he left for his home in St. Louis today after his second
consecutive weekend visit Pete and I had a moment alone. All this
very flattering attention. Checking up on the old man? "Well, I
wanted to see what changes had taken place in you," he said. "I can't
see any." I used to think it was strange for grown men to hug, but
we hugged. Enjoyed every second of it.
Monday, June 29
The stint is now gone, the last step in my bladder operation except
for a virtually guaranteed residual infection. Dr. Banfield put me
back on Cipro in anticipation.
The Lupron, bless it and damn it, will be with us for another three
months. Got the shot today. It has to cover the entire period of
radioactivity following the seeding.
Well, I couldn't get Nick Lailas agitated over Theragenics' shorting
the doses of their customers' orders of radioactive seeds. He said he
hadn't heard of it but wasn't surprised. Still, he says, there isn't a
chance in the world that I'm going to get less seeding than I need.
All the work in determining the dosing is done by him and Dr. K and
they check all the seeds that arrive for their potency. It's getting
pretty hard to hold on to fears that the elimination of the Gleason 8
is going to be booby trapped.

113
The infection arrived with a flourish at bedtime: the shakes and 103
degree fever.
Tuesday, June 30
Complete wipeout. Got up for breakfast and then slept and slept,
with time out for brief dialogues with Liesl, until 4 p.m. Watched
Venus Williams destroy a beautiful Spanish player at Wimbledon
and returned to sleep until 9 p.m.
Banfield told Liesl if the shakes and high fever happen again go
directly to the hospital. He would have to insert a tube into my left
kidney to drain the infection. But I'm pretty sure we've gotten past
that. No fever all day, and a reasonably lively interest in the world
around me.
Wednesday, July 1
Theragenics dropped almost three points. I think I had better start
rooting for their success. My seeding is less than a month away and
I'd hate to have them worrying about finances while they're
preparing my dosage. Go T!
Which reminds me. I heard today that the urologists' market for
prostate cancer patients of 5 5 and over is past its peak and the
market is now growing among younger men. What kind of
intergenerational transfer is this? The answer lies in the widespread

114
use of the PSA test. When it first became popularized tumors were
discovered by the thousand, many of them advanced. The urologists
have now caught up with the backlog and the number of elderly
gentlemen showing up for first time treatment is dropping. And, of
course, many more younger men are getting PSA tests routinely now,
with many more tumors detected.
Sunday, July S
Grandson David deplaned from 1WA looking lankier and bigger
footed than ever. At age 13 he wears 11 1/2 shoes and is just
sprouting past 5'7," which is my height. I think he's going to be the
first six footer in this family, but he will certainly not be the only
member who has tasted mothballs.
Peter phoned in the evening from Lafayette, Indiana, whence David
had just come, that all five of our grandchildren, gathered at Lotte's
and Walter's over the Glorious Fourth, had been licking mothballs
found in an attic bottle. They sure as hell didn't get such exotic
tastes from our side of the family. Mothballs were once known as
being effective only if you had a good curveball pitch to throw them
at the moth. No harm to any of the five; one lick convinced them it
wasn't sugar.
However, the real news out of Lafayette, Indiana, came from Lotte to
Liesl on the same phone call. Her brother Otto Landman, a retired
genetics professor living in tbis area, had just had brachytherapy.

115
Can't wait to hear about his experiences. The last time Otto and I
compared notes we were talking about the fabulous cave paintings in
Lascaux. This is a much deeper subject.
Monday, July 6
Otto turned out to be the best witness I could possibly find about the
seeding procedure. He brought me current battlefield reports. He
was a patient just last Thursday of Dr. Koutrouvelis and his team.
Only the urologist was different. He had great reviews for the entire
cast. It was uncomfortable on the table, ass up and awkward leg
position for 2 1/2 hours, but the epidural block monitored by a fine
anesthesiologist kept him free of any real pain. The nurses gave a
ringside commentary on what was happening below, step by step,
and when it was through he got up and walked away. There were no
side effects, right down to no pain and normal peeing. Could he give
me a more welcome report? Obviously not.
In the afternoon we were off to Vancouver, David, Llesl and I.
Arrived at 10 p.m. and spent the night at an airport hotel.
Tuesday , July 7
Shaws picked us up at the hotel in the morning, spun us around
Vancouver on a series of errands these island folk take care of when
they hit town. Then by Queen of Capilano, the ferry, to Bowen.

116
Wednesday, July 8
Woke to the breathless views from the Shaws' guest room.
Monday, July 13
Heading back east. At 6 a.m. Vancouver's vast new airport looks like
the major population center of the world, with everyone out
catching a plane to somewhere on earth. Of course we were there
too. We got on a United ticket line that appeared stagnant until
David disappeared in search of the john. In a flash the line melted
and we were showing documents to the agent and wondering if
David would possibly re-emerge before we were hustled off to the
rest of the processing. But the real delay came from a
schoolmarmish computer that would not spit out boarding passes for
our reservations. Its problem was that we had changed our
departure point from Portland to Vancouver. At one point we had
five United "owners" huddled around the screen and offering advice.
Meanwhile the clock was running out for our flight. One of the
conferees alerted the gate by walkie-talkie that they were near a
solution and to expect us. But we had a long way to go through a
mass of humanity converged around the U.S. immigration lines. Not
to worry, said one of the owners. "There is an express lane, but in
order to use it one of you must be pushed in a wheelchair." Liesl
volunteered and sat back into it. For an instant in that environment
she was the beautiful James Hilton heroine who leaves Shangri-la
and instantly becomes an old woman. Then she turned on her smile

117
and returned just as quickly to being Ernie Wittenberg's ageless and
gorgeous heroine. A United agent took his place as the chair pusher.
Our parade to fool the authorities and foil a couple of thousand
people trying to squeeze through three lanes to catch their planes
proceeded, led by our mock invalid, followed by a totally amused
David and me and trailed by a United worker shepherding a cart
with our luggage. The immigration officer paid no attention
whatsoever to the sham. When I explained that David was our
grandson he even made a joke. "Yeah, does he know that?" And we
weren't the last to board the packed plane. Two Japanese gentlemen
arrived 10 minutes later.
Boarding the Chicago leg, the three of us slowly worked our way to
the back of the cabin through all the jocks practicing weightlifting
with huge suitcases squashed into the overhead compartments. Our
mission: Find row 23. But not on this plane. The last one was row
22.

Unannounced change of planes! No harm done. We were

advanced to Row 3.
Friday, July 17
Woke up with a birthday, the latest in a long line dating back to
1920. Seventy-eight says the calendar; thirty-five, maybe thirtyseven says my psyche. There's young man hiding inside this aging
body and he has no intention of letting it grow old gracefully. It will
have to wear out with daily pushups, crunches, a lot of tennis,
regular visits to the weight room and, hopefully, an active mind.. My

118
birthdays are celebrated by small enclaves in Missouri, Maryland
and Virginia. liesl and Janet, Dan's wife, planned a picnic at
Montrose Park in Georgetown attended by David, who will be going
back home to St. Louis tomorrow; son Dan, who works not far away
from the park, and Janet and their three kids, Alex, Jamie and Andy.
Jamie was once again soliciting signatures for a petition: Sign here if
you want grandpa to have a happy birthday. I lucked out. There
was no opposing grassroots movement
Ski phoned this morning to give me the phone number of the man
who holds together the prostate cancer support group at Alexandria
Hospital. I've spent a lifetime avoiding as many meetings as I can
and particularly the "I've been saved and I'm going to help you" type
of session that I imagine this one to be. But I think I'd like to hear
from people who have been through this labyrinth just before that
ever-closer seeding procedure. The leader, a Fred Gersh, wasn't in,
so I spoke to Mrs. Gersh and quickly realized how lucky I am to have
had my tumor diagnosed in 1998 and not nine years earlier. She
said that her husband would probably have opted for seeding if it
had been available when the disease struck in 1989. Instead he had
a radical prostatectomy and a lot of other things since and he's still in
there punching. I wonder if anyone is ever truly cured of prostate
cancer.
Mrs. Gersh said the group meets at 6 p.m.on the third Tuesday of
each month, which fortunately for me is next week. She said they
average 40 members per session but attendance in the summer

119

months is hard to predict. "Come with your partner," she invited.


Liesl said she was game.
Saturday, July 18
One little quirk: Today is my birthday too. Until I saw my birth
certificate when I was 20 I naturally thought, as my mother told me,
that I was born on the 18th. She must have had a long hard night.
Anyhow, we just refer to my birthday season and go about our
business.
Monday, July 20
We went to the opening day of the Legg Mason tennis tournament in
Washington. It improves our game at least 20% for a very short time
just to watch these pros in graceful action. Then we fall back into
hackerdom. We forsook Agassi, Chang and Courier, the marquee
players, for the non-household names like Caldwell, Carlsen, Sa and
Canas. While I'm not fit to even stand on the same court with any of
these touring professionals, we do have something in common. Like
me, these preliminary round types usually have to fight like hell just
to stay in the tournament past the first round. These are my people
and if I'm going to learn anything it's going to be from watching
them struggle to stay alive.
By chance we sat in the stands near the fathers of two of the players
and the coach of a third. The coach, an Argentinian whose

120
preliminary boy was Canas, was in agony. From time to time he
called out instructions in Spanish to his faltering player, a practice
entirely against tournament rules in any language During several
games he looked down at his hands disconsolately rather than
watching his man being taken apart by a monster serve and
peppering volleys. He could follow the action from the sound of the
ball and his plastic Latin face reacted to each point. He told us that
his pony-tailed player was making his American debut here and that
the fans loved him in Buenos Aires. In Washington the fans merely
felt sorry for him as he was outgunned by a Czechoslovakian giant
with a buzz haircut who should have been charged for the dents his
serves made in the court surface.
We encountered the fathers at different matches. Senhor Sa, a
Brazilian, had the pleasure of watching his mirror image son mop up
a promising Finlander. It meant he could see another match
tomorrow and, dream on, all the way to the finals. At least it would
amortize his fare from Belo Horizonte. The son has lived during the
last five years in the tennis instruction Mecca called Florida and this
was one of their infrequent get-togethers.
Mr. Carlsen, a grossly fat Dane in a baseball cap, reacted to the match
play of his son by frequently changing his seat up and down in the
stands trailed by his 10-year-old boy who from time to time
shouted: "Come on, Ken." But Ken lost in the third set.

121

We had a great time. What prostate cancer? Can't even remember


it.
Tuesday, July 21
Hey, I'm out of the closet. I couldn't stop talking about my case at
the support group meeting this evening. I really expected to merely
listen and observe, but the atmosphere made me a canary after all
these months. I'm ready to mount a soap box and shout that I'm a
survivor. Attendance, shrunken by a heat wave and vacations,
consisted of nine men and three wives. Except for me, all of the men
were between 60 and 64 and, like me, deeply engrossed in their
groins. I must say that the session made a believer in me of the ingathering of the afflicted. There's something very comforting to be
around a bunch of people who know exactly what you're talking
about and what you're up against. They've been there themselves
and they bring experience and reliable information into the mix.
Saying we were all passengers on a roller coaster ride, Fred Gersh,
retired military, called on each of us to tell our stories. With
comments and questions we used up the allotted 2 1/2 hours just
like that. The case histories of these nine people covered about the
entire range of the major treatment possibilities: surgery, external
beam, hormonal and--counting me and a man named Ben who are
opting for it--seeding. The regular who usually holds forth on his
experiences with internal radiation couldn't make it tonight.

122
Gersh, who has been fighting this thing since 1989, had three of the
variety of treatments all by himself and he's still waiting to deliver a
knockout punch. He had the radical surgery first and when his PSA
continued to go up even without having a prostate his doctor
prescribed external beam radiation. Now he's on hormones. Cal, a
long time user of hormones, has 25 extra pounds of girth to show for
it. Ben,61,a retired Treasury economist, has been wrestling since his
diagnosis in May whether to go radical surgery or seeding. His
urologist advocates surgery, which doesn't surprise Ben considering
that he is a urological surgeon who makes much of his living by
operating. Ben had already discounted this apparent self interest
and still loves his urologist. His doctor is wary of radiation seeding,
saying that it only has an eight year history of side effects behind it
and all kinds of problems could still develop. That's true, but Ben
isn't buying that argument. He's going to be almost 70 when eight
years are up and is willing to take a chance on this one shot, in and
out, method that doesn't interfere with male potency and seems to
have so few side effects. He says, appropriately in the idiom of his
old Treasury days, that he thinks seeding will be the gold standard of
the future.
One of the radical surgery people spoke in awe after the meeting
about Dr. Patrick Walsh, the nation's best known urological surgeon
in the United States and, most likely, the world. One salaams in the
direction of Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore at the mention of his
name for Dr. Walsh gave men a sex life after a radical prostatectomy,
no small achievement. He created the "nerve sparing" operation

123
which removes the prostate without severing the two bundles of
nerves which run through it and provide the wherewithal for an
erection. It has been copied by surgeons everywhere. While not
guaranteeing 100% results (who can, even with perfect prostates?) it
lessens greatly the prospective patient's concern about one of the
two big "I's" , impotence and incontinence. But Maxipads may still be
required on the Saturday supermarket shopping list.
This support group is a branch of the national support organization
called Us-Too and, particularly because of its location in Alexandria
Hospital, 10 miles from the Capitol, it gets involved in lobbying the
Hill for a greater share of the research pie. The other, and
considerably larger, pieces of that pie are eaten by breast cancer and
AIDS. In 1996 AIDS got $1.62 billion in Federal research funding.
Breast cancer received $550 million and prostate cancer $80 milion.
Us-Too's best case for getting more money lies in the incidence
figures which reverses the three diseases. In 1966 there were
317 ,000 new cases of prostate cancer, 184,000 cases of breast cancer
and 72,000 of AIDS. In mortality AIDS leads the three recipients
with 51,000 deaths in 1996 against 46,000 from breast cancer and
41,000 from prostate cancer.
The lobbying battles for the money can be fierce. Last year women
supporting breast cancer waited outside a House men's room for a
congressman who swung a key vote. They swamped him when he
came out. Fred Gersh says his people have a better strategy in mind

124

for the next mark-ups. "We're going to convince him in the men's

room."
When we left, skipping the restaurant dinner that follows these
sessions, Llesl and I carried a half pound stapled stack of
newsletters, meeting notices, a sheet with names, addresses and
phone numbers of all attendees, the full text of President Clinton's
Father's Day speech on prostate cancer, a call to arms for grassroots
lobbying complete with instructions for gaining the ear of one's
congressperson. And when I was halfway out the door, Fred Gersh
called out to me: "Do you have one of these?" It was a pamphlet
called "What Every Man Should Know About Seeding." These people
don't fool around.
Wednesday, July 22
Is there ever an end to the surprises in this line of work? "What
Every Man Should Know......" states that while there are little or no
side effects the first day or two after seeding urinary urgency-translation: "I've got to pee and I've got to pee right notv---can start
about a month into the seeding and last for as much as a year. Just
when my reshaped bladder has been doing such good work. And, oy,
get this:

11

Urinary incontinence affects less than 1 percent of all

patients, usually those who have had a TURP in the past." Guess who
has had a TURP in the past? Wasn't the quality of life a little bit
better before I read this?

125
Go figure about death! It sent a whole load of steel scaffolding
crashing into a Times Square hotel to grab an 85-year-old woman.
sitting quietly in her room. Her family had been very concerned
about her safety living in the heart of the big, bad city. Muggers,
rapists, murderers, wild drivers. Nonsense, I'm perfectly safe here
and besides I almost never leave my room at the Hotel Woodstock.
It used to be said that a bullet has your name on it. But scaffolding?
Friday, July 24
The protocol for next Tuesday's seeding calls for a look into my postoperative bladder today by Dr. Banfield. Objective: Is it free of
tumors? It is.
"Flying colors!" said Dr. Banfield, who is marking his 66th birthday
today. He confirmed my suspicion that prostate cancer patients are
never free of their urologists no matter how long they live. His first
radical prostatectomy was performed in 1960 and the patient still
shows up for his checkup every six months. And he has a whole
roster of current patients who started with him in the 60's, 70's and
80's in all stages and forms of treatment.
Obviously most prostate cancer progresses like molasses. So who
contributes to the annual death count which runs between 40,000
and 50,000 per year? In this age of total awareness through the
media and powerful groups like the American Cancer Society there
are still millions of men who didn't get the message or didn't care to

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