Back From the Spiritual Desert

By ART CULLEN

I spent 20 days of Lent sitting in a heap of ashes reviewing my shortcomings again, wondering if death would beckon me from deep in my bottom.

This has never been my favorite season, and the hair shorts itch more as the years encroach. Seems that there is enough suffering, fasting, sacrifice and self-denial year-round that you shouldn’t have to carve out a time to dwell on it. Nature and politics will impose themselves regardless.

A blood test for the prostate called the PSA during the first week of March took a big jump. I was already on the urologist watch-list. As a nurse prepared to insert a snake from behind for a biopsy last year, she said, “You can thank your brothers for this.” Three of them have had the Big C.

The supposedly efficient, expensive medical system set me up for an MRI in Sioux City 20 days following my test results, which gave me ample time to stew until March 27.

Has it spread? What is happening down there? Every ache and pain has fateful resonance. I know that the treatment for prostate cancer, if detected early, is tremendously successful, as it has been for my kin. But still …

You dive down rabbit holes on the laptop. Oh my gosh my PSA score will kill me for sure. What does that MRI machine look like — I could not handle being John Glenn in that tube circling Earth. Might I never rock and roll again? Well, buddy, you are not Wilt Chamberlain or Donald Trump, so calm your libido and cool your jets.

To prove that I am not impotent I named son Tom managing editor to reflect what he already is doing. He is responsible. Call him. I’m busy thinking: Yeah, I could have been not such an irascible sloth, but there are no dead bodies in my trunk, and I will leave the campsite no worse than I found it.

That sort of introspection leads to a tight jaw, then lower back pain, and finally a splitting headache when I awoke the morning of March 27 to flush the system at 6 a.m. Tom drove me to Sioux City and I reported for duty. Name. Date of birth. Photo ID and insurance cards, please. Go sit over there and wait.

That magnet, I’m thinking, is so powerful it will pull your belly button out if you don’t remove your stud. What will it do to my neurosis? The nurse cheerily greets morose me, and tells me it is like a hammer pounding in there. They put ear plugs in me and headphones on me and slide me in. The hammers start pounding and buzzers sounding with Outlaw Country vying for attention. I could sure use a drink, Merle. At least I can see out the end of the machine.

The hammering stops. They pull me out. They have to do another gross indignity to me, cheerfully, thanks to my three brothers, and I am howling to the moon. Go ahead and scream, nobody can hear you in here. Nobody will come to your rescue. And then they slide me back in, whimpering, and the hammers start to pound and the beepers start to sound and it feels like my head is going to blow open.

This goes on for a half hour and they retract me, and send me on my way across the river to South Dakota, where there are no taxes, which is of course where the doctors are. The urologist there was very nice and seemed as up-to-date as Kansas City. He saw a couple spots. One turns out to require more inquiry. We wait. Life is a series of indefinite interregna strung together by the terror of not knowing. Most of the time.

No cause for alarm, it appears. Whatever it is, it is not advanced. Doctors have been watching me for years — you really should get the test, old man. Prostate cancer probably won’t kill me but my bad habits and defective genes will catch up to me someplace else.

My 20 days in the spiritual desert unveiled some epiphanies:

Rural health care stinks. Diagnostic equipment is in short supply, as is staff, and patients are lined up like lemmings to the sea. This vaunted private system of ours can’t be better than Canada, unless you can afford the Mayo Clinic. The doctors are great when you can see them.

There are worse people than me, and probably even than you. I may have a little explaining to do in the end, but I don’t think I am a hardened criminal beyond redemption after some earned time in Purgatory.

Miles remain before I rest. Keep it between the ditches and watch for deer. It’s honestly the best most of us can do.

I came home from my Sioux City/South Dakota trip and passed out. An hour later I woke up with the headache pretty much clear and the back pain rapidly subsiding. The brain is a crazy thing. At least, mine is. Is that my fault, too?

Art Cullen is publisher and editor of the Storm Lake Times Pilot in northwest Iowa (stormlake.com). He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2017 and is author of the book “Storm Lake: A Chronicle of Change, Resilience, and Hope from America’s Heartland.” Email times@stormlake.com.

From The Progressive Populist, May 1, 2024

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