'It was a moment of absolute terror'

When he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, broadcaster Michael Murphy feared the worst, he tells PAUL O'DOHERTY.

I WAS DIAGNOSED with prostrate cancer three years ago. Initially, I was driving past the Central Mental hospital thinking about my grandfather who had died inside its wall when I got a call to say my PSA was raised.

It was a moment of absolute terror. The bottom just fell out of my world and I felt immobilised by fear. I dropped the phone, couldn’t remember the phone numbers I was given for a consultant, and realised that the root of all my terror was the fear that I wouldn’t survive. I was convinced it was over.

I describe it as “the ivory fist clenched around the shaft of the steel blade, held up behind the hooded head” – the knife going into me like the angel of death.

People who have been touched by cancer are very much aware of this. It’s a different reality, a derealisation, and it takes away some of your positivity and you live in a completely different way after it.

I went to see a consultant who was very matter of fact. “This is a slow growing cancer Michael, and I want you to go away and come back in 12 weeks,” he said.

I, on the other hand, was hopping up and down, telling him to “take it out, take it out”. So, when I went back to him after the 12 weeks I turned down radiation and chemotherapy and headed straight for the operation. You don’t think of the side effects like erectile dysfunction or incontinence. You see it as a danger to the “me” and it must go. The will to live is that strong.

Anyway, they did the operation and the surgeon was happy he had done his best. After my operation, he said: “Michael, we got as much of it as we could. There was a small piece the size of your thumbnail that was attached to something else in your body and we couldn’t remove it.”

So, although they removed as much of the cancer as they could, there is still that little bit that remains – the ticking time bomb. It’s the thought that tells you, “Aha, you think you got the all clear, but . . .” And, that “but” is the ticking time bomb that can go active at any time.

They say in some of the manuals that “there may be a degree of discomfort after the operation”.

Hey, I can tell you, it’s hell, it certainly was for me. And, on some of the American websites it says: “You can be out of hospital in three or four days.”

I was actually in there for a fortnight. And the pain management is not so good. They promise to keep you free of pain but, while they were giving me the highest dose of morphine or whatever, it still breached the pain barrier and didn’t take it away. In fact, it is intensely painful.

I thought I was fine and I went back to work after three months. But I wasn’t fine. It really takes time to have the confidence again to resume life.

What you take for granted when you are in the thick of things becomes a big effort when things change. The assault of the cancer and the operation is like throwing a stone into a river. The mud comes up and darkens the water.

And, you remember all the other previous assaults, physical and emotional. So it was tremendously important for me to write this down – coming from my training in psychoanalysis – reordering the past, thinking that what had happened in the past wasn’t that important, and that I should let it go.

I was left incontinent after the operation and I searched on the internet as to what could be done. I came across this guy in Innsbruck, Dr Peter Rehder, an urologist, specialising in transplant urology and reconstructive urology, who had pioneered an operation which helped.

In no time, I was being flown to Innsbruck to have the procedure, courtesy of the VHI, when I got a telephone call from Tom Lynch, a surgeon in St James’s Hospital, who said that Peter Rehder was coming to Ireland to share his knowledge with Irish surgeons, and they were going to do four operations and would I like to be one of the guinea pigs. Of course, I said “yes”, and they did that operation in January this year.

The operation went something like this. The bladder is rather like a cylinder in a hot- press and, for some people, the weight of it can keep the valve open so that you are continually dripping urine.

In my case, they put in a little sling with three screws either side and hung a hammock across, which effectively keeps the bladder in check and the valve closed. So, I can now go to the loo like a normal person. It’s been a fantastic success although occasionally I have the odd accident.

About a fortnight ago, I was in RTÉ between the seven and eight o’clock bulletin in the morning. I made a mess of myself in the loo and I had to go back into the lights of the studio, in between Aine Lawlor, Cathal Mac Coille, the person reading the newspaper and the interviewee. The incontinence is just the worst, a really appalling difficulty.

My cancer now is absolutely at bay and I don’t really think about it that much. I’m occasionally reminded of it around the incontinence issue, and I have to make sure to go to the loo on a regular basis, but that’s really about it.

I’ll live with the erectile dysfunction in that it came down to a very, very simple conundrum: I had a choice to be alive with this or be dead. Hey, far better to be above ground.

• Michael Murphy's At Five in the Afternoon – My Battle With Male Canceris published by Brandon Books, price €16.99