janekane (imported) wrote: Wed Dec 12, 2012 6:48 am
Perhaps this is a suitable time and place for me to add a little to the telling of how I got a safe, surgical orchiectomy in 1986. I consulted physicians until I found ones who were both willing and able to listen to my cancer risk concern and offer useful suggestions, which I successfully followed. The process of my never "taking "No," for an answer from any physician who did not understand Bayesian statistical approaches to effectively avoiding plausible future danger (said danger, for me, being dead from metastatic cancer in the manner of my dad and brother) took me into the domain of a physician who suggested how to go about getting a safe and effective surgically-accomplished orchiectomy.
My method, when a physician informed me that the physician would not help me get the orchiectomy, was to ask the physician to tell me who might help. That led to a collection of doctors who said, "No." And it led, finally, to the doctor who said, "Yes, provided that you never tell anyone that I did the surgery."
How did I find the doctor who did the deed? Part of my method, as I lived in one of the larger cities in the U.S., was going to urologists at hospitals associated with medical schools, physicians who were used to teaching future physicians, and who were decently aware of the realm of theoretical biology, and who had some semblance of a chance to decently understand my concerns.
I now live about a couple hundred miles from the closest such hospital, and am in the process of finding a suitable doctor there for continuing care. By continuing to ask doctors, without giving up, I did finally meet with a doctor whose dad had died following prostate cancer treatment complications, and who had a personal sense of the risk, and who was willing to do the surgery. Because medical doctors are licensed, it has been a simple task to find that some of the doctors who helped me find a way to get my orchiectomy have died of old age.
Yes, I did get and show the instruments (an Elastrator and bands) to the doctor, such that the doctor got the notion that I was very, very serious about getting the orchiectomy.
A few weeks ago, I got a copy of my medical records for the purposes of continuing care in seeking a doctor at the closest medical school affiliated hospital to where I now live. And the records are now decently accurate; they state that I am high-functioning autistic, that I have a cancer gene condition that led to my dad's and brother's deaths, and that I got my orchiectomy as prophylaxis for cancer risk.
I had help in making my decision to get my orchiectomy. Most of a decade earlier, I had worked with a man notably older than me in a local community organization; early in our encounter, he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer that had not metastasized. He was given radiation treatment, he was long divorced and, for strong religious reasons, was not doing sexual intercourse and had no intention of doing same. Nonetheless, his doctors persuaded him that it was better to keep his testicles in spite of his cancer. Well, the radiation did not stop his prostate cancer from metastasizing to his bone marrow. When he had developed serious pain from his metastatic cancer having spread to other tissues, then, and only then, did his doctor(s) decide it was time for his orchiectomy. He went into the local hospital as an outpatient late one afternoon, got his orchiectomy, and was at a community organization meeting a couple hours later, with no noteworthy post-surgical discomfort. He did not have testicular cancer, and a "simple," trans-scrotal orchiectomy was all he needed to have a longer time living with with the pain of metastatic prostate cancer.
When I was in pursuit of my orchiectomy, I also had the story of someone who waited too long for his orchiectomy. That story, a true one, was another of my persuaders.
I live in a world in which the future has not yet happened, and in which choices really are choices such that it is impossible to know for sure what the consequences of any particular choice will eventually be. Therefore, I am unafraid of making mistakes because I find that, as a human brain process, "making mistakes" and "learning" are two contrasting names for the same neurological process, to wit, doing something and learning what happens as a result. To me, the only difference between "making a mistake" and "learning something" is whether someone likes, or dislikes what is learned in the process of making a particular mistake.
Oh, yes, there is one more thing in my medical record that is, I find, accurate. It is this, "He is hyperverbal." ... As I am here demonstrating?
I had one, and only one, real reason for getting my bilateral orchiectomy. I expected getting it would give me a better long-term subjectively-experienced quality of life than otherwise. That expectation was only a guess, and, having gotten my orchiectomy in 1986, have had no way to test what my quality of life would have been without it. It, therefore, remains only a guess that my life has been better than it would have been without my orchiectomy.
To me, the whole of my life has been making guesses and learning what happens, which is always making another guess and learning what happens, and making another guess and learning what happens.
Whatever guess I make, what ever I learn, is always good enough because the guess I make is the guess I make and I learn what I learn
How could life ever be better than that?
Everything I have read on the Archive Message Boards has been, to me, of someone making a guess and describing what was learned.
Perhaps the main learning for me, here, has been confirmation of my lifelong observation that, when someone makes a decision for someone else, one or another form of harm is likely.