Button Up Your Overcoat

Abstract

Friday night. Marty tells me he's bleeding again, worse than before. afraid to wear khakis. The blood might stain them, he complains. But I don't want him to go to the Hilton in jeans we're picking up an old friend who's in town for the National Broadcasting Convention. She and her new boyfriend are staying at our house for the weekend; I have activities planned for all of us. I'm tired of our life being interrupted by this problem anyway, tired of dealing with doctors, tired of telling them there has to be a solution, that their diagnosis can't be right. I'm especially fed up with all those urologists acting as if I'm a pain in the ass for wanting my husband to stop bleeding from his penis every time he urinates. They seem to feel that I'm a special burden, interfering all the time because I myself am a doctor. But I don't want to fight with them. That embarrasses him and gets him care from angry physicians. He wants me to be his wife, not his doctor. Besides, thinking back on the times I complained about doctors being difficult patients, about how they were unreasonable in their expectations or wrong in their self-diagnoses, I've vowed to try and forget I'm a doctor when he's the patient. I've forced myself to think: They're right; we'll have to live with all that bleeding coming from his prostate gland. Nobody knows why it's happening and there's no cure. At least there's no sign of cancer. We're finally at the point where we can rationalize living with this, trying to have as normal a life as possible. After all, it's not as if prostate problems are rare over forty. Many of our friends have had biopsies to check for prostate cancer, though none of them have admitted to suffering from bph (benign prostatic hypertrophy), which is the diagnosis Marty's been given. That's a far more common condition but one considered an old man's problem. Discussing bph forces guys to imagine embarrassing exami-