About Me

[Some random bald guy from Clip-Art site]

Hello there, welcome to my blog.  My name is Fred Murts and, yes, I get kidded about the character on "I Love Lucy" but he spells his name differently -- Mertz with a "z"* -- and isn't nearly as good looking as I am.  There are a few other differences between Fred Mertz and me.  He is fictional, for one thing, and to the extent that the concept applies to discarded fictional characters for whom no final episode was ever written, he is dead.  I, on the other hand, am only lightly fictionalized and am very much alive.

I live in Winston-Salem North Carolina with my wife Ethel and our two dogs, Miss Kitty and Dammit.  We have two lovely, grown-up, lightly-fictionalized daughters, both married and both living in various suburbs of Atlanta.  Our younger daughter recently gave birth to our first grandchildren, twin boys whose names I haven't bothered to make up.

I am 59 years old.  I work as a software developer in the finance offices of a pharmaceutical company.  I try to keep myself fit but, since I work at a job that involves sitting down most of the time, it is a bit of a struggle.  I belong to a gym; in theory I work out three times a week but in practice I get there once, maybe twice a week.  I weigh more than I ought to but less than I would if I wasn't careful about what I eat.  With an effort I can keep myself right on the line that divides the "overweight" category from "obese".

In October 2011 I was diagnosed with prostate cancer.  I am kinda bummed out about it and there is no one to really talk to about it. Of course, I can and do talk to my Urologist, Dr. Flabio Cavernosa, about my prostate cancer -- about once a month for half an hour -- but discussing my medical options, while necessary and helpful, doesn't quite provide enough cerebral overpressure release to calm me down.  My head will still explode.  From time to time I try to talk to Ethel about it -- she is my wife, after all -- but her dad died of prostate cancer and she is as freaked out about things as I am.  So I have to be calm and confident when I talk to her.

I can tell her, quite truthfully, that I have only the least little bit of cancer -- Gleason score 6, involving less than 4 percent of only one of the twelve biopsy samples taken, PSA of about eight -- and that with treatment I have something like a 95 percent chance of being cancer free for the rest of my life.  Even if I didn't elect to get treatment, prostate cancer is so slow growing that it would probably be years before anything really bad started to happen, and it might never.  Since I am relatively young and healthy I plan to have my prostate removed in a couple of months and she will have me around for a long, long time.  This all soothes her, satisfies her; she's OK.  But I'm not.

The problem is that even with the best available treatment for prostate cancer -- robotic nerve-sparing prostatectomy -- my odds of avoiding permanent impotence after the operation are not so great.  I've read a lot of research studies about the incidence of erectile dysfunction after radical prostatectomy since I was diagnosed.  The numbers are all over the map but the general consensus is that with a skilled surgeon a man has an 80 percent chance that he will get back 75 percent of his sex life after the operation -- gradually over a period of one and one-half to four years.  80 percent is pretty good odds (about the same as Russian Roulette) so the question is: can I afford the 25 percent?  Since I have a bit of ED already, and need a boner pill to properly annoy Ethel, I doubt it. 

Thus, this blog.

*My great-grandfather was a Mertz but he anglicized the name during World War I due to anti-German sentiments in Cleveland, Ohio where he lived.