The Cut

And losing the feeling of having an uncompromised body.

There is a strange sense of incompleteness that accompanies a person after cancer surgery, depending on which organ is removed. It is not necessarily pain, nor even disability. Rather, it is the sudden awareness that something which had been part of you since birth is simply gone. Before the operation, I pushed that thought to the back of my mind. I maintained a positive attitude, trusted the specialists who performed this procedure every week, and avoided dwelling on my own involvement in the process. Perhaps it was the nurse in me trying to reassure the patient. When you are the patient yourself, however, such confidence can sometimes be another form of denial.

Prostate cancer comes in all sizes and grades. The scale used to judge the likelihood of it spreading placed me at the lower end of the risk spectrum. The prognosis was excellent. The doctors spoke confidently of “nipping it in the bud”. My wife consoled herself with us having caught it early. Yet even when the outcome is expected to be good, there is nothing minor about the surgery itself. Depending on the size of the prostate and the complexity of preserving the surrounding nerves and structures that are important to a man’s bodily functions, the operation can take four or five hours. As one friend remarked with characteristic bluntness, they were doing some very deep excavations.

It is remarkable how easily the mind separates diagnosis from consequence. Before the operation, I thought mainly about eliminating the cancer. The prostate itself became almost an abstraction, an unfortunate object that had to be removed. Only afterwards did I begin to understand that the body keeps its own account. It notices absences.

The weakness following surgery arrived much as it had after the biopsy, except magnified. Once again, I was surprised, though in truth the surprise belonged only to the part of me that had refused to imagine the reality of what was coming. I suspect many patients do the same. We focus on the statistics, the treatment plans, and the encouraging words of specialists. We tell ourselves that modern medicine performs miracles every day. All of that is true. Yet when the operation is over, and you wake in recovery, statistics offer little comfort. What remains is your body, altered in ways both visible and invisible.

The façade of confidence and calm that carried me into the hospital proved surprisingly fragile. The smallest setback could crack it. A poor night’s sleep, an unexpected ache, a nurse’s passing comment, or simply seeing the surgical wounds for the first time could darken the entire day. For someone already predisposed to depression, as I am, these moments arrive like weather fronts. A dark cloud rolls across the sky, blotting out every rational thought. The fair weather of optimism feels impossibly distant.

More than anything, I wanted to go home. Not because home offered a cure, but because home offered familiarity. Hospitals suspend ordinary life. Time becomes measured by medication rounds, observations, and visiting hours. You begin to feel less like a person and more like a project under construction. The instinct is to escape, to reclaim some sense of normality.

Yet reality travels with you. The catheter serves for the time being as a constant reminder of that. It swings beside you as you walk, follows you into bed, accompanies every movement. The bladder has been cut and rejoined. Internal wounds are healing beyond sight. Every tube and bag is evidence that recovery is not an idea but a biological process. You cannot will it to happen faster, nor can you ignore it.

What I had not anticipated was the quiet mourning. No one had died. The operation had been a success. The cancer was gone. Family and friends quite reasonably expected relief, and I felt relief. But alongside it was another emotion that was harder to name. It resembled grief.

I found myself thinking about the missing organ more often than I expected. Not because I missed its function, but because I missed the sense of wholeness it represented. For most of our lives, we move through the world without considering the integrity of our bodies. We assume completeness as naturally as breathing. It is only when something is removed that we realise how much of our identity rests upon that assumption.

The scars eventually heal. Strength returns. The catheter will be removed, and the struggle for continence begins, but finally, life hopefully resumes its familiar rhythm. Yet somewhere in the process, a subtle shift occurs. You begin to understand that survival is not simply the avoidance of death. It is also the acceptance of change. The operation removes the cancer, but it also asks something of the patient. It asks us to make peace with the fact that we will not emerge exactly as we entered.

Perhaps that is the final cut. Not the surgeon’s incision, but the division between the person you were before and the person you become afterwards. Healing is learning to live comfortably on the other side of that line.