Sometimes irony turns into torture.
Sometimes life isn’t fair.
He was sixty, fit as a man in his forties, and proud of it.
A lifetime of running, healthy eating, no alcohol, no cigarettes. “Prevention is better than cure, ma’am!” he told us with a wink.
He came to the clinic not because he was sick, but because he wanted to stay healthy.
He just wanted a routine check-up — “a prostate exam, to be on the safe side.”
No symptoms, no pain. He still “pissed like a race horse,” as he put it, laughing.
His Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) test result came back the next day.
The number was off the charts — in the thousands.
A repeat test confirmed it.
Scans followed.
The cancer had already spread — bones, lymph nodes, liver.
How do you tell a man who feels healthy, who has done everything right,
that his body is a ticking time bomb?
How do you tell a man full of life that he is full of death?
When my colleague — my girlfriend, a doctor — broke the news, he didn’t speak.
He didn’t shout, didn’t bargain.
He just sat there, silent tears tracing lines down his face.
He had taken care of himself all his life — and now his own body had betrayed him.
He walked out of the clinic that day slower than when he came in.
And even though he wasn’t in pain yet, he was already suffering more than most dying patients ever would.
Sometimes, prevention doesn’t prevent.
Sometimes, life just isn’t fair.
(Painting: “Silence” by Anton Semenov — often used to accompany the story online.)
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