A Little Shock, No Awe (what’s in a name)

From The Desk Of Ty Creighton

Dearest Reader,

Before anything else, thank you for opening this envelope.

Under this website’s Rare Letters tab you will find letters that combine into The Penis Monologues (TPM). I want to speak to the TPM name; why I started the Monologues and explain how the letters intend to strike directly at the silence associated with cancers. Penile Cancer comes with obvious issues of gilt, shame, denial and many other emotions. These often slow or prevent early diagnosis and treatment. Penile Cancer shares these and other deep concerns with cancers and other illnesses. So while the initial focus of the letters is male cancers I will include letters where I some commonalities we need to shed light on.

Rare illness can make a person feel exiled from ordinary language. It can leave patients, caregivers, and even good medical people standing in the same room without a shared way to say what has happened. That silence is part of what led me here.

This collection of letters was ignited from that silence.

The title Penis Monologues may remind some readers of The Vagina Monologues, and I understand why. That work helped pull private, intimate anatomy out of taboo silence and place it under bright, honest stage lights. I respect that. I am glad I had the opportunity to attend a performance some years ago. It helped open my eyes.

But this collection comes from a different place. It comes from rare cancer, altered anatomy, masculinity under pressure, pathology reports, infusion rooms, wound care, dark humor, and the strange private weather that arrives when illness enters one of the most symbolically loaded parts of the body.

I did not begin this collection to imitate anyone. I began it because too much of this penile cancer experience remains trapped behind embarrassment, euphemism, ignorance, and the reflex to look away.

So I chose letters.

A letter can go somewhere a speech cannot. It can sit beside the bed. It can wait quietly on a table. It can arrive in the hands of one person and say, without spectacle, I am speaking to you. That matters to me. These letters are meant to be personal, even when they are public. They are meant to carry witness from one human being to another.

Some will be written from the patient’s side of the bed. Some will be written toward the disease (aka ‘Squam’ in my case). Some will speak from the big infusion chairs, from the wounds, from the long nights after treatments, from the hands of those who care for us, and from the places medicine reaches but language often does not.

If you are a PSCC patient, I hope these letters offer companionship and help you develop sharper questions for your care team.
If you are a caregiver, I hope they honor what you have carried, including what no one saw.
If you are part of a medical team, I hope the Letters return some human connection to the procedures, the scans, the dressing changes, and the difficult conversations.
If you are a researcher, I hope they remind you that every target, assay, cohort, slide, and endpoint eventually arrives in a living body, in a frightened household, in a real life. All of you, as a team, will be recognized in the Letters for your role in improving care.

That is what I want this collection to do.

Not to shock for the sake of shock.
Not to borrow importance from things taboo.
Not to make the body into a spectacle.

I want these letters to make room for a more honest kind of care and support for individual journeys. Healing is central to my journey.

Our shared rare tumor culture is not only clinical. It is emotional. It is intimate. It is bureaucratic, lonely, absurd, tender, frightening, and sometimes unexpectedly funny. It is made not only of scans and pathology, but of mirrors, marriages, partnerships, ports, scars, sexuality, sleep, waiting rooms, language, and the ways people learn to survive what they never imagined they would have to name.

This missive (aka letter) collection stands apart because it comes from that exact rare space.

It comes from a place where masculinity, anatomy, illness, and medicine are forced into close quarters. It comes from a world where silence can deepen suffering, and where the lack of humane language can become its own injury. It comes from the belief that art can sometimes carry what explanation alone cannot. I hope my art opens eyes, because Early Eyes Save Lives.

The goal of these letters is to separate real care from the stigma, ignorance, and compassionless reflexes that our culture still attaches to intimate illness. Let’s give patients/caregivers a strong new voice that focuses on the best possible outcomes, while shedding society’s taboos.

We need to evolve beyond our biases to a place where healing guides us.

If these letters help even one person feel less alone, less ashamed, or more clearly seen, then they have already begun to do their work.

I see you.

Ty