Professionally, I’m a urologic surgeon with expertise in prostate cancer. Personally, I think about a lot of stuff beyond prostate cancer. I’ve always loved words and writing helps me clarify my thoughts. Here is a place I can also share them with you.
I’ve authored scientific papers on prostate cancer in peer-reviewed journals, and written clinical guidelines. But here I can freewheel a little more, providing my own insights on prostate cancer and anything else that comes to mind. Surgeons are more than just doctors who operate. We’re whole humans, too. I’m interested in cracking the glass that separates patients from surgeons, and holds us somehow separate from the rest of humanity.
As a urologist and as a person, I’ve been around long enough now (I’m 52 as I write this) to see a lot of death and illness up close. I’ve had patients I’ve known for many years die, and last year my mum died at the ripe old age of 90. I saw her breathe her last breath. It was the most profoundly clarifying experience I’ve had. Heartbreaking, yet beautiful. And it has informed my worldview like nothing else.
Death is something I think about a lot. It’s not a morbid fascination. It’s Stoic philosophy’s principle of memento mori (remember you will die). As urologists, death is something we prefer to avoid in our patients. But for myself, remembering my own finitude seems to offer the most truthful perspective on how best to live.
And so I’ve decided, as the years pass, and as my opportunities to share my writings dwindle, to make a start. I’ll be discussing the latest thinking in prostate cancer, how to best diagnose it, when and how it should be treated and when it’s safe to just keep an eye on it. And I’ll welcome discussion back from you.
In a consultation, I can only share my knowledge and experience with the patient across my desk. I’m hoping that these *Vermiculations, using the magic of the internet, will be a place where I can share my thoughts to a much larger audience, and so offer a lot more bang for buck. (Obviously, I won’t be giving medical advice to any individual patient on this platform, as each person’s circumstances will vary. But I do intend to provide some generic information that I hope will be useful.)
Reminding you that there is more to a surgeon than surgery, I’ll also be musing here on any other topics that catch my attention.
I hope you’ll find something here that informs, resonates, piques your interest, furrows your brow or maybe even curls your lip in a half-smile. I’m a scientist and this is just another experiment. Let’s see if it works!
*Why Vermiculations? I’ll get back to that! For now, I’ll leave you with a quote by Rabrindranath Tagore that makes a lot of sense to me:
I slept and dreamed that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted - and behold - service was joy.