How my father lived for 20 years after the diagnosis of prostate cancer – this is the traumatic truth about the cruel disease

I still vividly remember that I was waiting in the hospital because my father had his first operation during his fight against prostate cancer.

I had done my GCSEs that day and had come directly from school. My steps were delayed when I reached the department on that sizzling hot summer afternoon, my heart full of fear.

We waited hours – the operation lasted much longer than planned. When Dad was finally driven out of the theater, he was white as a spirit. Mama and I grabbed hands firmly. Somehow smaller in that hospital bed, smiling but weak, Dad seemed vulnerable for the first time that I could remember.

The doctors informed us that his blood loss had been serious. That was when it touched me: this cancer was real and he might not make it. I put on my brightest smile, but I felt stifled by emotion while I bowed to kiss him.

Such a moment changes everything. Dad was long and strong and handsome, and when I was a little girl, he seemed superhuman.

But suddenly I realized that even my father would not live forever. From that moment there was a deeper dimension for my love for him.

I thought of that day when I heard the news that former US President Joe Biden, 82, has been established an aggressive and incurable form of prostate cancer, which has spread to his bones. It is a common but cruel disease – especially in the last phases.

It is six years, almost to this day, since my father died Cecil. He had fought courageous cancer for more than 20 years. We were especially close – he called me ‘the apple of his eye’ – and my earliest memories revolve around him.

Every memory I have from youth, our house in London, the holiday and playgrounds and parties and birthdays and school, my father contains a calm, calm, strong presence; An absolute constant in our lives.

Dad was in the mid -40s when my parents got married; My mother was his junior for 15 years. They had five children under ten years (me, my two brothers and two sisters) and it was a chaotic but happy childhood. They had very little money, but we were rich in culture and books and adventures and conversations.

Dad was a highly respected literary figure, although modest about his illustrious origin. Close to his aunt Virginia Woolf, the iconic feminist writer, he organized meals and rubbed shoulders with people like TS Eliot. And yet, if you didn’t ask him about these incredible literary friendships, he wouldn’t mention them.

In addition to an accomplished rider from his time in the army, he was a renowned antiquarian book collector who spoke Italian and played the flute.

He could change the diaper of the youngest child while helping the oldest child to practice their time tables – not bad for a man who came to paternity so late.

As a much older father, school friends in the playground sometimes asked: “Is that your grandfather?”, Which was incredibly offensive. They didn’t want to be unkind – they were just thoughtless.

Although clearly erudite, Dad was not a snob: he was energetic and always for building a tree house or a go-kart, or playing a spontaneous football match.

Foreign flights and hotels were an unheard of luxury, especially for a family of seven, but Dad bought an old van and fit it with bunk beds and mattresses, and overhauled a caravan so that we could explore France and Italy.

We spent a memorable summer champions on Lido in Venice and I can still imagine my father, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a fierce sandstorm (the Mistral), who pursues our tents in the beach in his pajamas.

Dad was a man of few words, but every time he spoke, we listened. Just like him, I went to the publication and writing tradition.

We are an incredibly close family. All five of our children loved my father, my mother worshiped him – and life would have been unthinkable without him.

I think that is why my parents did not tell us the complete truth. When the prostate cancer was first picked up in the late 1990s, the doctor gave him ‘a year or two’ to live. It turned out that wild was inaccurate. But I cannot imagine how frightening such a diagnosis – which came down to a death sentence – must have been at that time.

I only found out years later and talked to Mama after Papa’s death. Even then it was disturbing to hear.

Initially, the doctors talked about an ‘enlarged prostate’, which is common among the 50s. Dad was in the 1970s. At some point the enlarged prostate became a real tumor – in other words, cancer. But my brothers and sisters and I never led and told about it; It just became clear over time.

For years we did not dare to use the C-word. Nowadays everyone talks about cancer, but even a few decades ago there was a sense of confidentiality, even shame, around it.

When we asked for hospital appointments, Dad would refer to ‘The Old Waterworks’, which means that prostate problems or operations or treatment.

Only in that first operation did that real fear crawl into my heart. Until that moment Dad had been fit as a violin and strong as an ox. I can’t remember he had a single day in bed, and certainly no hospital visits.

Born in 1927, he was from that generation of men who never cry (I never saw him shoot a tear) and never get sick. As a very young man he had fought in the Second World War. He did not switch to ailments endlessly – as we all do today! – and certainly not discussed personal medical matters.

We were lucky to live close to the University College Hospital (UCLH), one of the leading cancer hospitals in the world, and he had some excellent consultants and surgeons.

Twenty years ago the treatment of key gap surgery was to cut away and reduce the size of the tumor and to relieve the pressure on the prostate. (Nowadays there are targeted medicine therapies and laser treatments.)

Those operations were traumatic. Fortunately, however, his pain was well controlled with analgesia and he tolerated radiotherapy very well. But it became more and more stressful as the years passed. Nowadays, cancer patients talk about ‘scan-xery’ the fear they feel before their regular checks and scans. We have experienced the same fear of monthly PSA tests that monitor levels of prostate-specific antigen in the blood.

A ‘healthy’ PSA score in men younger than 50 is about 2.5 nanograms per milliliter in the blood, but in those older than 70, doctors are probably not worried, unless it surpasses 6.5ng/ml. PSA is the best test currently available for detecting possible cancer, but it is not perfect. Studies even suggest that one in seven men with a normal PSA level can have cancer.

Every month we waited for the results with regular breath: if the number went up, it was bad news; When the song dropped, it was good news.

Waiting for ‘the score’ every month during those years was if your breath holds. We never knew what would bring in the coming months. And for my father it was as if you were living in borrowed time.

As a woman I don’t have the right to give men about health problems – but I do it to have your PSA levels tested. After all, it is a simple blood test that all men should get. Yet we know that men are much less likely than women to see a doctor about health problems, and we are strange prudish about ‘personal problems’.

I asked my best male friend if he had recently had his prostate checked and he shivered. When I asked him “Why not?” He muttered that he didn’t want to be investigated there with rubber gloves. That is idiot, if you think about how important this kind of basic health control are. Only two of my male friends are relaxed enough to talk about it – one also lost his father to prostate cancer, and the other had a teenage beam cancer.

The diagnosis of Joe Biden apparently came as a shock; His prostate cancer is late stage, aggressive and incurable.

We were lucky that my father had spared the painful pain caused by spreading to the bones, instead experienced a soft death surrounded by his family. Every day for those 20 years he must have felt him like a little miracle for him. And our last days and hours together were unspeakably expensive.

My only persistent regret is that he never met my baby boy, born the next summer. But my son bears Cecil as a middle name and often talks about his namesake. For me, that keeps grandpa Cecil alive every day.