No room for Mr. Big Man in the recovery room

This is a story about the razor fine line between humility and humiliation and it begins with a trip to the operating room.

After making the decision to have my cancerous prostate removed by a surgeon and his robot, I manage to stop thinking about it for a few weeks. My oldest son is graduating from college and I’m racing to complete as much work as I can on a house I’m remodeling. The last days pass in a blur.

Eighteen hours to go and I guzzle 20 ounces of cherry-flavored magnesium citrate that will give the scrubbing bubble treatment to my guts. As I trudge to the bathroom over and over, I realize that this is truly the beginning of putting my fate in the hands of others.

At the hospital, I sign documents and give my girlfriend and parents final hugs and kisses. Then I doff street clothes for the classic open-backed gown, slipper socks and paper-cloth bonnet of the surgical patient. A shot of Versed helps me relax.

And then we are on our way. I bump through the door of the operating room, secure in the bosom of the drug, beneath a giant light with a million lenses. I breathe gently through the anesthesiologist’s mask and pass peacefully into the future.

Git 'er done
As easily and simply as I fell asleep in the OR, I awake in the recovery room.

The first thing I see is Katie Cannon, the photojournalist documenting my journey for the series, and her camera. “Hey, Stuckey!”

I ask Katie, who was in the OR for the entire procedure, how it went. Then I immediately fret that I'm putting her in an awkward spot if something has gone horribly awry.

But she smiles, which probably means that one of my legs has not been accidentally amputated.

I am happily amazed by the simple facts that I am alive and in no pain. I can feel that something has happened to my belly, but that’s about it.

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A comforting cocoon of morphine and the doctors’ mostly positive post-op reports keep the anxiety at bay. Although the tumor was bigger than expected, the operation went very well and they believe all of the cancer came out with my prostate.

Intense gratitude for all that others are doing for me carries me happily through the first hours. But when I try to rise for the first time, weakness and nausea sweep over me and an unavoidable sense of failure sets in.

That’s what this part of my journey is really all about.

As men, many of us invest so much in carrying the ball and seizing the day. We’ll handle it. We’ll git ’er done. We don’t need any help. You can count on us. And if you can’t count on us, well, at least we can count on ourselves.

I have always loved being the go-to guy. From my youngest days, I was intent on taking care of myself and everyone else. I got my first newspaper job at age 14 and my second at 17, moving 200 miles away from my family to earn my own way through college.

I took as my hero another San Francisco Bay Area boy, Jack London, the ultimate in self-made rugged individuals. I talked bigger, wrote faster and drank harder than all my friends. At work or after, I thrived on being "The Man."

FREE VIDEO Inside the OR The surgeon's camera offers a glimpse inside Mike Stuckey as the da Vinci Robot goes to work. MSNBC.com

No matter what I wanted, I had only to point myself in the proper direction and go, physically as well as intellectually. In my 20s, I set tile in San Francisco, muscling 65-pound buckets of mortar two at a time up six flights of stairs with a Pall Mall dangling from my lips. In my 30s, I hiked all 212 miles of the John Muir trail through the heart of the Sierra in a dozen days. In my 40s, I have scaled Washington’s ice-covered mountains from Rainier to Glacier Peak.

True, I have slowed down some. I don’t drink any more. I try to listen at least half as much as I talk. But those were choices I made, not consequences forced on me by renegade cells staging a coup inside my own body, tiny but powerful avatars of evil that have left me roped to a bed like some kind of goofy Gulliver.

So in my hospital room now, surrounded by smiling loved ones and flowers, I am in truly uncharted territory. I am breathing for myself, but that’s about it. I had to be lifted into this bed by others. I’m being fed and watered by a tube. Another tube is doing my peeing for me, emptying the blood-tinged results in a bag on the floor for all my visitors to see.

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