There is no more potent holiday for me than Fathers’ Day.

Prostate cancer is a life-threatening, lifelong condition. Overcoming it requires a lifelong commitment—a commitment to your life, to your health, and to the behavioral changes you are going to have to make to beat this disease. There is no short cut. No magic pill. Improving your health and quality of life takes work.

There is no more a potent reminder of how fragile and fleeting life is than being diagnosed with cancer.

Our medical industry is suffering from systemic dysfunction. The drivers behind much of this dysfunction are two-fold: conflict of interest and lack of transparency. The net result is eroded trust and reduced effectiveness.

As a society, we can and must do better. Doing so will require us to collectively demand more from the various participants in the system.

There is a great scene in the movie “Back to School” in which Rodney Dangerfield’s character hires Kurt Vonnegut to write a critical essay on the works of, yes, you guessed it, Kurt Vonnegut. The resulting paper receives an F grade from the professor and a comment that “you clearly do not know the first thing about Vonnegut!”

Today, let’s focus on those initial, confusing days following a prostate cancer diagnosis, which many of us know all too well, but some of us are just know experiencing.