Getting Back in the Game

October 22, 2010

Scott J. Capozza, MS, PT

“Hi, I’m Scott, and I’m a cancer survivor.”

That might be the way that I would introduce myself at a support group; I might even open with this line if I was presenting at a cancer survivorship conference.

But on a first date?

Getting cancer is never easy, and trying to get back to your world pre-cancer can be a struggle. How are my co-workers going to treat me? Are my friends going to look at me any differently? Will things ever go ‘back to normal’ with my family?

And when you’re 23, single, and just finished chemotherapy, there’s another question: how do I handle dating?

I’ll admit, I was not a ladies’ man when I was in high school and college. You would’ve thought that dating would be easy; after all, the ratio of girls to guys in my PT program in college was 3 to 1 (and no, that’s not why I went into PT school...didn’t hurt, though). But I was the guy who could never ‘seal the deal,’ so I had a lot of friends who were girls, but not a girlfriend.

Then cancer hits.

It was bad enough that I was bald and pasty white while going through chemo, but to lose a part of my anatomy that physiologically and figuratively defines me as a man is tough. Maybe I’m alone on this, but to lose your testicle can, on some level, make you feel less of a man. And if you feel like less of a man, you begin to ask yourself, “will a woman ever want to be with a guy who isn’t 100% whole?”

Ironically, my first date after treatment was with my nurse’s daughter. She was in nursing school and would come into the chemo room once in a while to observe her mom at work. She was cute, and we talked once or twice while I was in treatment. Her mom, on the side, also let me know (not so subtly) that she was single. A few months after finishing chemo (I now had hair and eyebrows again), I was in visiting my nurses when the one nurse told me that her daughter did not have plans for Valentine’s Day. Half kidding and half serious, I told her, “oh, well, I’ll take her out for Valentine’s Day.” The next day, her daughter calls me up and we agree to go out for dinner.

So now what? You would think this would be easy. She already knows that I had cancer (maybe not my specific type, but she did see me when I was bald and had the chemo IV in my chest). Her mom’s a nurse, and she’s in nursing school. But does she want to really hear about my surgeries, the chemo, the fatigue, the nausea, the bone pain from the Neupogen? On top of all that, my treatments effectively rendered me sterile; having kids is not going to happen without major medical intervention. Does she want to know that? Does she need to know that? Are first dates like job interviews, and if you lay out all your cards and you don’t have what the other person is looking for, do you not get a second date? If you don’t disclose all of these issues on the first date, and down the line things get more involved, then what?

OK, so maybe not all guys overanalyze a first date like this; but when you are self-conscious about your body after going through cancer treatments, these questions can creep into the back of your mind.

In the end, we had a nice dinner, but nothing materialized. She did ask me how I was doing, which I took as an open door to talk a little bit about my cancer journey without overdoing it. I do remember that she spoke mostly about nursing school, studying a lot, and complaining about getting a B on an exam. I remember thinking to myself that our priorities and our perspectives on the world were very different at that time; the worst thing that had happened to her was that she got a B on a test, and the worst thing that happened to me was...well...there were a lot of things that I felt had happened to me that were worse than getting a B on a test.

So how do you bring up your cancer journey on a date, if at all? In my case, it was actually a lot simpler than I thought. Years later, I brought it up on a first date with someone who I thought already knew my story. I was pretty active in fundraising for the Lance Armstrong Foundation and American Cancer Society, and most people at my work knew my story because of this. They were all very supportive, and I felt comfortable telling my story in that setting (OK, really I was trying to get people to sponsor me...call me shameless). There was this really cute girl at work (let’s call her Katy), and I struck up the courage to ask her out for dinner. Since she worked at the same company, I figured she already knew my story. Over dinner, I made some comment about being on chemo. She paused for a second, let it sink in, and then we continued our conversation. She hardly blinked when I told her I had cancer. To her, it didn’t matter that I had cancer. I guess it’s not really how you tell someone you’ve had cancer as much as who you tell that you’ve had cancer.