By Marty Laubach

I have known Marty since the early 1970s; he’s a key member of my chosen family. When he shared this reflection with Facebook friends earlier this summer, I asked if I could publish it here. Thank you, old friend!

May 2023 — Hi all, I have been pretty quiet on social media for a while and haven’t said anything about my diagnosis, not because I didn’t want people to know, but more because I didn’t really know what to write. Many people around me know (there is a good gossip network here), but I guess it is time to tell people who don’t know, and as importantly, let people who do know from the gossip network that it is OK that they know and can talk with me about it if they want.

I finished a 6 week radiation therapy last week and finally wrote this reflection. I have been told that it isn’t overindulgent and is actually a decent read, so here is my reflection on being diagnosed with prostate cancer:

I have found in the last few years of meditation that when I am experiencing pain I go into a meditative state and “embrace the pain as a part of the ‘human experience.’” My thought is that when I am on my death bed facing corporeal oblivion, would I trade 5 more minutes of life if it meant re-experiencing that pain? That thought first helped me through a root canal in 2018, and more recently through the last 6 weeks of radiation treatment for prostate cancer. It follows a narrative that I have been developing while reflecting on the twists and turns of my life, which is that I am here to experience (verb) the “human experience (noun).”

This essential human experience reflects the body/mind duality, but my recent life exposes the blur between them. The cancer and treatments are certainly an embodied experience, except that I have never actually felt the effects of the cancer. This whole incident has been mental – and in this case specifically social. I have been told by socially credentialed authorities (doctors) that a part of my body is … well, rotting … because of a set of numbers. My PSA was 8. The first biopsy gave me a Gleason score of 7 and a “stage II,” the second biopsy gave me a Gleason score 8 and found that the rot had moved from the prostate to the seminal vesicle, raising me to “stage III.” On the basis of these numbers I have been taking these pills for the last 8 weeks and for the last 6 weeks have been laying on a platform while a machine revolves around me twice making a screaming sound of a 1960s sci-fi ray gun as it burns my internal organ into scar tissue. But again, all of this is mental – I haven’t “felt” a thing from the cancer.

My embodied experience has been all about the treatment. The “hot flashes” that have estranged me from trusting my interoceptive sense of body temperature, and the “bladder full, bowels empty” imperative that scrambled my body’s intake and elimination cycles and estranged me from trusting my interoceptive sense of my elimination needs. And then, there is the loss of stamina that has come from the elimination of testosterone that is the point of the pills.

All of these numbers have mediated between the “me” of everyday experience and the underlying, unsensible state of my body.

This is the same numerical mediation that our technological culture has created between humanity and nature. It is the principle we discuss in the sociology of science that when a credentialed authority pours a test tube of goo into a beaker of glop and it fizzes and turns green, then it is assigned some kind of meaning about the underlying nature of the universe. Or worse, when the European Union spends millions of euros to build a machine that spins nuclear particles around a miles wide loop, crashing them together to get some photographic streaks in a bubble chamber and readings on instruments, and then declare that they have “discovered” the “God particle” – which really just means that their instruments gave the reading that their esoteric math predicted – math derived from their theories about the underlying nature of the universe.

As above – the God particle – so below – the scarification of a cancer infested organ in my body.

All of these numbers, narratives, and moments from my part of the “human experience.” Would I trade it all for 5 more minutes of life on my death bed? Well … I certainly traded these last 8 weeks for the hope of another few years.

At least the number reinforced theories of the underlying nature of the universe produces nice computer toys for me to play with.

© 2023 Marty Laubach

Marty Laubach is closing in on retirement as a Professor of Sociology at Marshall University, his third career after Computer Programmer and Data Processing Manager. His research focuses on spiritual experiences, in particular by members of minority religious communities in the US like American Neopaganism and Buddhism. Marty has waffled between being health conscious and not, sedentary and active, carnivore and vegetarian (settling on flexitarian).