Dis-Ease: Living with Prostate Cancer

by Dale Rominger

There is a conspiracy of silence surrounding the experience of prostate cancer. Visit the health section in the bookshop and you will find books by doctors but few of the personal narratives so well represented in other illnesses. The twin threats of incontinence and erectile dysfunction cause many men to withdraw into embarrassment behind a veil of silence. Sons do not know the outcomes of the treatments their fathers have undergone. Friends are reluctant to speak to friends.Dale Rominger has written candidly and with self-deprecating humour about every aspect of his experience, from his diagnosis in 2011 to his radical prostatectomy in 2012 and its aftermath. He describes both the physical and emotional journeys with reflections along the way based on his efforts to make meaning of what he was experiencing. While quick to emphasize that he is not a medical expert and that no two men’s experiences will be identical, he offers openness as a gift to other cancer patients and their families and friends. The writing is scrupulously unsentimental while acknowledging deep vulnerability, disturbing questions, anger, uncertainty and fear.

63 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 19, 2013

About the author

Originally from the United States, I moved to the United Kingdom in 1987. I’m a progressive thinker, speaker, world traveller, consultant and writer. I have travelled extensively throughout the world on fact-finding missions, to assist in development projects and to create educational and exposure programmes with international partners. I retired early and am now spending my time reading, writing, keeping the house, learning to cook and working in the garden. I've also created a website: The Back Road Café (www.thebackroadcafe.com). So far I have published three books: Notes from 39,000 Feet ( essays - “You will never read another book like this one...Rominger offers a unique perspective of a world traveller who sees and has recorded the everyday and the extraordinary, the political, practical and the spiritual”); Alien Love (a novella - “a hugely enjoyable but challenging book that makes you think about your own make up as a human being”); and Dis-Ease: Living with Prostate Cancer (Kindle edition only - “an utterly honest and compelling piece of writing that pulls no punches when it comes to personal journeys”). I live in London with my wife Roberta.