We had assembled in the early morning of Father’s Day. We were at the studio of Maestro, well into his Sunday morning gospel show on 99 JAMZ. The reason: to do the most fatherly of interviews, an interview about prostate exams.
Diva Shirley Mordock sat to my left. On Maestro’s cue, she let loose sounds that no human larynx should make. I was transfixed. Noting my hypnosis, she leaned to me and whispered: “Black men don’t like to get their prostates checked.”
Nothing gets me focused like discussion of prostate exam, one of medicine’s least reproducible tests. She was right, but only part right, I thought. I hear about dislike of prostate exam from Barbadian men, Latin men, good old white boy men … men don’t like their prostates examined. Why? Because they are men, I suppose. So I turned to her with this: “Shirley, prostate cancer is a uniter, not a divider. Black men are just like all the other men.”
From my doctorly perspective, common social divisions – age, geography, sexual orientation – are not useful. My patients all seem to want the same things when they are diagnosed, regardless of age, geography, and sexual orientation: survival, continence, sexual fulfillment. Their strategies for getting these things are so much alike.
I understand why people congregate as they do. We all feel fellowship amongst those who are like us. But overall, I think, men with prostate cancer are united, not divided. That is why the social network seems so effective. The ordinary divisions of age, geography, and sexual orientation have been stripped away. What you’re left with is men and women wanting fellowship and scholarship without the artifice of things that commonly divide them.
Happy Father’s Day, Maestro. And Happy Father’s Day to all the other fathers too.
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