Snookered!

About thirty years ago, I made a really, really bad choice. One that caused me to throw away almost a year of my life. One that cost me thousands of dollars. One that caused me to lose an investment property. And worst of all, one that caused me to lose my dignity.

I was a successful business-to-business marketing consultant. I had a small roster of dependable clients. And I had twenty-five years of business experience. I thought I knew the ropes.

One of my clients, we’ll call him Bill, was the president of an up-and-coming medical electronics manufacturer. The company was bought by a major corporation, and Bill was moving on. He suggested we go into business together.

Our idea was simple. Using his business management background and my marketing skills, we would offer our services to startup technology businesses to help them attract investor financing. We had the experience to recognize good business opportunities and the ability to write business plans that would appeal to prospective investors.

I had worked with numerous small technology entrepreneurs. They knew their technology inside and out, but often knew next to nothing about business management and marketing.

We would provide our services in return for a fee to be included in the business plan or an equity position in the company. It was a good idea in 1995. It still may be.

The only catch was that my business partner was a dishonest grifter who was only looking out for himself.

The first clue that I chose to ignore was that every time I suggested we sign a contract to protect us, he said his lawyer was working on it. That it was just about ready. I trusted him.

I introduced Bill to many of my clients and colleagues. He and I had long conversations on the way to these appointments about business and ethics. Bill confirmed everything I wanted to hear. In hindsight, he played me like a cheap violin.

The second clue I chose to ignore was that several of my friends and colleagues to whom I introduced Bill said they didn’t like or trust him. I assured them that they were wrong about him.

I knew it would take some time to get our business off the ground. I plowed so many hours into naming, marketing and publicizing our business venture that I ended up neglecting some of my current clients. My billings were down, but I believed in Bill and the future of our relationship.

My personal bills started piling up. I relied on credit cards to tide me over until the money started coming in. Then, one of the tenants in my two-family investment property suddenly left without paying their rent.

Bill reassured me that our contract and our success were right around the corner.

I couldn’t ignore the next clue. I received a phone call at home one Saturday morning from a former member of the Board of Directors for the medical equipment manufacturer.

“Karl,” he said after a little small talk. “I just heard you’re in business with Bill. You do know that he’s a liar and a grifter, don’t you? Everything that comes out of his mouth is either not true or a wild exaggeration. Do yourself a favor and don’t go through with it.”

I was dumbfounded. This guy was a lawyer who knew Bill very well. A sick feeling came over me. I began to realize that I had been taken in by a con man.

I met with Bill to talk it over. He told me that one of our prospective clients had made him an offer that he couldn’t refuse. When I asked about our business plans, he explained that some things just don’t work out.

I admitted that I was behind on the payments for my investment property, and he offered to take it off my hands for what I owed on it. I finally saw that Bill was only out for himself.

I sued him for breach of contract; but a sympathetic judge said without a contract, I didn’t really have a case. Bill was smug at the hearing.

I was so professionally crushed and personally humiliated that I sat in my home office playing video games all day for nearly three straight months. A good friend and client helped me regain my confidence and get back to work. I later landed a job as Marketing Director for a very successful food company. It was the best job of my career.

I‘m sharing this experience because I want you to know that it’s easy to get fooled by a con man – particularly if you believe in the goodness of people as I do. I wanted so much to believe in Bill that I closed my eyes to reality.

If it happens to you, forgive yourself and move on. Don’t give a con man the power to continue ruining your life.

On Becoming a Eunuch

It started one September morning when I got out of bed and peed blood. That wasn’t a good sign, ao I called my primary care physician. She instructed me to go directly to the local hospital.

At the hospital, a urologist performed an ultrasound of my bladder and admitted me for a cystoscopy. This involved inserting a catheter into my penis so he could inspect my bladder by feeding a cystoscope through the catheter up into my bladder by way of my urethra. The cystoscope had a lens that let him inspect my bladder for signs of cancer. He was then able to pass a special tool through the cystoscope to remove several polyps for analysis. Fortunately, I was sedated throughout this procedure.

I awoke in a hospital bed. The first thing I did was push down the sheet covering my lower body and discovered the catheter was still in place. When I saw the size of the catheter and thought about the urologist forcing it into my penis, I was very glad to have been sedated.

Any modesty I had evaporated with this procedure. I had never before had so many people concerned with my manhood. For the next two days, I had nurses checking every few hours for any sign of infection.

On the third morning, two nurses came into my room to remove the catheter. They explained what they were going to do and pulled down the top sheet. One nurse took hold of my penis. The other said to take a deep breath and then exhale when she told me to. When I exhaled, she pulled out the catheter. The pain was brief but intense.

Having two attractive young women handling my penis would be a sublime fantasy in a different situation.

The results of the procedure were not good. My bladder was riddled with cancer.

The urologist explained that I had two choices. It was either a slow, lingering death from cancer or have this very scary operation. As if I really had a choice.

He referred me to Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center, the largest hospital in northern New England, for the surgery. There, I met my new urology team. The chief urologist was a large man with a Nordic accent who was all business. The rest of the team were handsome young interns wearing matching dark green scrubs and colorful scrub caps. After more ultrasounds, the team performed another cystoscopy that confirmed the diagnosis of the first one. This time the catheter was gone when I awoke, and I was scheduled for surgery.

The chief urologist explained he would be removing my bladder and my prostate. He said he would take a section out of my small intestine and then reconnect it. The section would be used to create a new bladder. Because this faux bladder didn’t have the necessary muscles to function like a bladder, it could not control the flow of urine. It would be surgically attached to an opening in my abdomen called a stoma, where a plastic pouch could collect the urine. He said it was a complex surgical procedure that would take 4 to 4 1/2 hours, but he had successfully performed many of them before.

He didn’t mention that I would lose all sexual function.

In less than three weeks. My life had dramatically changed.

The morning of surgery, I arrived at the hospital at 6:00 am. I was taken to a small pre-op room, where a nurse instructed me to take off all my clothes, put on a hospital gown and and lie on a gurney. An anesthesiologist came into the room and explained he was going to start anesthesia. He inserted an IV line into my arm and injected something through the line. I began to feel sleepy. As a nurse wheeled me to the surgical suite, he asked me how I was feeling. I replied that I felt like I was being wheeled on a gurney to surgery and then fell asleep.

The procedure went as planned. I awoke the next morning in my hospital room with no pain, thanks to oxycodone. The nurses encouraged me to get up and walk around the unit. I liked walking, but I soon grew bored walking around the big nurse’s station. I decided to leave the unit and walk around the hospital.

DHMC is a large hospital. From the door to my unit, I could walk by the life-size moose sculpture down the North Mall to the main entrance. There, I could turn left down a long hallway to the East Mall, which runs parallel to the North Mall, then turn left down to the end of the East Mall, where a long corridor leads to the nuclear imaging center. Then another left turn down a long corridor past the wonderful Sol Levenson mural back to the moose sculpture. I estimated the whole trip had to be the better part of a mile and planned to walk it every night.

What I didn’t know was that I wasn’t supposed to leave the unit unless accompanied by a nurse. Someone turned me in during my first midnight excursion, and one of my unit nurses was sent to capture me. I was eventually able to convince the urology team doctors that I had no risk of falling and was allowed to tour the hospital alone.

At least four members of the team came together in their scrubs and scrub caps to visit me every morning around 11:00 a.m. They said they would let “the boss” know how I was doing. “The boss” visited me every two days to personally confirm that everything was properly healing.

Specialty nurses showed me how to change my urostomy pouch. The pouch has three pieces: the gasket that makes a water-tight seal around my stoma, the skin barrier that adheres to the gasket and my abdomen, and the pouch that snaps onto the barrier. It’s a simple but reliable device that must be emptied every 2-3 hours and changed every 3-4 days.

Wearing and changing the pouch was humiliating and annoying at first, but I soon grew accustomed to it – particularly when considering the other choice.

I was in the hospital for nine days before I was released. “The boss” said I should continue walking and could gradually resume my daily exercises.

After being home for a day, I was annoyed and depressed at having to do everything for myself again. No button to call a nurse if I wanted something. My lovely wife was a wonderful one-woman support group, but had no intention of being my nursemaid.

As the weeks crawled by, I regained my strength. I was shocked by how much muscle tone I lost by being in bed just nine days. I also lost 20 pounds.

I looked up online how much an adult human bladder weighs and learned it can weigh up to eleven pounds when full. An adult male prostate weighs less than one-half pound. Throw in a few lymph nodes, and it’s still under 12 pounds.

Am I glad I made this choice? Absolutely! Do I like having to wear this pouch for the rest of my life? No!

My cancer is gone for now, but I will continue to have regular follow-up screenings. Whatever the results of those screenings are, I’m grateful to have additional time with my wife, my children, my two granddaughters, and my four great-grandchildren. And additional time to cross things off my to-do list.

A positive outcome of this whole experience is that I no longer have to worry about erectile dysfunction.