Just as I see no reason for my physician to love me, I would not expect him to suffer with me either. On the contrary, what would please me most would be a doctor who enjoyed me. I want to be a good story for him, to give him some of my art in exchange for his. If a patient expects a doctor to be interested in him, he ought to try to be interesting. When he shows nothing but a greediness for care, nothing but the coarser forms of anxiety, it's only natural for the physician to feel an aversion. There is an etiquette to being sick.

I wouldn't demand a lot of my doctor's time; I just wish he would brood on my situation for perhaps five minutes, that he would give me his whole mind just once. I would like to think of him as going through my character, as he goes through my flesh, to get at my illness, for each man is ill in his own way. Proust complained that his physician did not allow for his having read Shakespeare. I have a wistful desire for my relation to my doctor to be beautiful - but I don't know how this can be brought about. Though I see us framed in an epiphany, I can't make out the content.

Just as he orders blood tests and bone scans of my body, I'd like my doctor to scan me, to grope for my spirit as well as my prostate. While he inevitably feels superior to me because he is the doctor and I am the patient, I'd like him to know that I feel superior to him too, that he is my patient also and I have my diagnosis of him. There should be a place where our respective superiorities could meet and frolic together.

Since technology deprives me of the intimacy of my illness, makes it not mine but something that belongs to science, I wish my doctor could somehow restore it to me and make it personal again. When my father's father died in the French Quarter of New Orleans 60 years ago, the popularly accepted story was that on a humid night in mid-August, he had eaten a dozen bananas and then taken a cold bath. He was a man of 87 whose life had been a strenuous assertion of his appetites, and this explanation suited him, just as it suited his friends in the French Quarter. It would be more satisfying to me, it would allow me to feel that I owned my illness, if my urologist were to say, ''You know, you've beat the hell out of this prostate of yours. It looks like a worn-out baseball.'' Nobody wants an anonymous illness. I'd much rather think that I brought it on myself than that it was a mere accident of nature.

It is only natural for a patient to feel some dismay at the changes brought about in his body by illness, and I wonder whether an innovative doctor - again, like Oliver Sacks - couldn't find a way to reconceptualize this situation. If only the patient could be allowed to see his illness not so much as a failure of his body as a natural consumption of it. Any reconciling idea would do. The doctor could say, ''You've spent your self unselfishly, like a philanthropist who gives all his money away.'' If the patient could feel that he has earned his illness, that his sickness represents the decadence that follows a great flowering, he might look upon the ruin of his body as tourists look upon the ruins of antiquity. (Of course I'm offering these suggestions playfully, as experiments in thinking about medicine.) Physicians have been taught in medical school that they must keep the patient at a distance because there isn't time to accommodate his personality, or because if the doctor becomes ''involved'' in the patient's predicament, the emotional burden will be too great. As I've suggested, it doesn't take much time to make good contact, but beyond that, the emotional burden of avoiding the patient may be much harder on the doctor than he imagines. It may be this that sometimes makes him complain of feeling harassed. The patient's unanswered questions will always thunder in his stethoscope. A doctor's job would be so much more interesting and satisfying if he would occasionally let himself plunge into the patient, if he could lose his own fear of falling.

Applying to other friends, following new recommendations, I found another urologist. He's highly regarded in his field, and he inspired such confidence in me that my cancer immediately went into remission. My only regret is that he doesn't talk very much - and when he does, he sounds like everybody else. His brilliance has no voice - at least not when he's with me. There's a paradox here at the heart of medicine, because a doctor, like a writer, must have a voice of his own, something that conveys the timbre, the rhythm, the diction and the music of his humanity, that compensates us for all the speechless machines. When a doctor makes a difficult diagnosis, it is not his medical knowledge only that determines it, but a voice in his head. Such a diagnosis depends as much on inspiration as art does. Whether he wants to be or not, the doctor is a storyteller, and he can turn our lives into good or bad stories, regardless of the diagnosis. If my doctor would allow me, I would be glad to help him here, to take him on as my patient.

Although I hope to live for a while, my urologist is young, and I see us as joined till death do us part. Perhaps later, when he is older, he'll have learned how to converse. Astute as he is, he doesn't yet understand that all cures are partly ''talking cures.'' Every patient needs mouth-to-mouth resusitation, for talk is the kiss of life.