Game four - in which I get a needle inserted through my perineum and I die (again)
The perineum is the area between the penis and the anus and it's adjacent to the prostate. Once through the perineum the sampling needle is repeatedly stabbed into the prostate, as if it were a pin cushion, to extract cells from its different regions. This is done using an ultrasound probe in the anus, to image the process, and with the patient under a total anaesthetic - unaware.
So I lay on a hospital trolley, a cannula was inserted by a pleasant woman and everything went black - dead again - until I heard an angelic voice: "Richard! wake up."
So I had to rely on Wikipedia to find out what happened:
Cancer Research UK <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
There was no pain - analgesics not required - but it was uncomfortable - and no where near as much fun as the scanner. And I was passing blood in my urine for around two weeks. Julia was unsympathetic: "young women suffer that every month," she told me.
I was still confident it would all be a wild goose chase. But then the surgeon called me: "You have a left mid-post-lateral tumour (Gleeson 4+3) and while it is not critically urgent you need to do something about it soon. Sometime within the next three months would be a good idea."