I’m about to go adventuring again – more on that soon.  But prior to that I need to bring y’all up to speed on the figurative elephant in the room. And before I do that, I need to call on my friend Scott’s Rule #3: Don’t Make it Weird, Okay?

Short story is that I’ve been going through a mess of tests and doctor appointments (and mind-numbing battles with insurance) to pin down a plan of action for the prostate cancer we detected a couple of months ago. We’ve got it all sorted. We caught it very early, and the prognosis is excellent – prostate cancer is probably the second best cancer a guy can get. It’s easily detected, it’s slow moving, and there are a bewildering variety of effective treatments for it.

For my part, the plan is surgery at UCSF in mid-January, followed by a month or so convalescence in Palo Alto (hi kids!).

I’m grateful for your thoughts and wishes, but I’m going to ask y’all not to reach out with anything more than a brief “Thanks for letting us know” if you feel so compelled. Really. I know you care about me – the fact that you’re reading this rambling little blog is more than proof enough. But fielding questions and responding meaningfully to expressions of sympathy is going to suck the life out of me. And I’ve got so many other things I need to be spending time on right now! (remember that mention of ‘adventuring’?).

Especially: if you’ve got a friend going through this, I get it – there are a lot of us. I believe the statistic is that one out of eight men will live to develop prostate cancer. I’ve got a good support network put together. And if you’ve heard about some or another treatment that someone has gone through or is being tested somewhere, yeah, I’ve read about it too. I’ve got one of the top teams in the US on this, and am comfortable that among our many conversations and meetings, we’ve got that aspect covered.

I’m grateful for all of you, and for you wanting to help/sympathize/connect on this, but we’ve got it covered. Thank you.

Okay, glad we’ve got that out of the way. Now, tune in later this week for what I’m doing between now and mid-January. I promise you it’s more interesting than talking about cancer.

(Also, guys? Be like me and get your damned PSA checked every year. And track the trend. Easy way to save your life.)