The Guy Who Played Tennis at Week Six

Somewhere around month four after my prostatectomy, I heard a story that really left me down-hearted. A friend mentioned a guy who’d started playing tennis six weeks after his prostate surgery. Six weeks! I was still using pads. I was still flinching when I coughed. I was still sitting in the car after appointments trying to figure out whose body I was driving home in.

I didn’t say much. I just took the story inside and turned it into evidence. Evidence that I hadn’t trained hard enough before surgery. Evidence that I was behind. Evidence that something in me was failing in a way it shouldn’t have been. I knew I didn’t have good stick-to-it-ness habits with fitness, and now I thought this had impacted my kegels protocol.

That shame slowed my recovery more than the catheter had. I know that now. I didn’t know it then.

My wife said something during that stretch that I didn’t really hear at the time. She said you have to be careful not to make somebody else’s story your own. It took me about a year to understand what she meant.

Since then, what I’ve learned from coaching other men, is that almost every one of them is carrying somebody else’s recovery story. The uncle’s friend who was dry the day his catheter came out. The cousin’s cousin’s brother-in-law who said it only took two weeks. The article that promised continence by month three. These stories describe a crowd. The crowd is louder than your own body. And the crowd is wrong about you.

You are not an average. You are a specific person with a specific nervous system, a specific pelvic floor, a specific history of stress and grief. Your body is not behind. Your body is yours.

The first piece of work I do with the men I coach is help them put somebody else’s story down and away. That’s where recovery actually begins.