I’m scheduled to undergo a robot-assisted radical prostatectomy on Aug. 29, 2018. Scary shit, especially given the cloud of uncertainty that surrounds such operations—and not just the operation itself, but also the underlying rationale for even getting tested in the first place.¹

Robot-assisted prostate cancer surgery

Nevertheless, I’m hoping for the best, and finding comfort in the brilliant lyrics of Donald Fagan, whose “song oozes with cynicism for futures that never came to pass,”² and so seems completely appropriate in this context: “A just machine to make big decisions/Programmed by fellows with compassion and vision/We’ll be clean when their work is done/We’ll be eternally free, yes, and eternally young…”³

¹ Richard Ablin, “The Great Prostate Mistake, ” NY Times, March 9, 2010.

² Sief, “What a beautiful world this will be,” Futures Words, May 15, 2012.

³ Donald Fagan, “I.G.Y.,” The Nightfly, released October 1, 1982.