The first indications...

I'm a total waste when it comes to doctors and doing check-ups and all the preventative maintenance things I'm supposed to do. And I had some weird idea that because my father hadn't been diagnosed with prostate cancer until relatively late in his life, I somehow was working with the same time line.

WRONG!

So, what got me on the path of prostate cancer? My shoulder. 


I went to the doctor because I'd injured my shoulder and she (the doctor, not my shoulder) bawled me out for not coming in for a physical for ... uh, like 5 years. Count 'em. I wanted to argue, because she has to know her audience and for Pete's sake, my eye doctor sends me reminders, and so does my dentist, but I never get one from her! However, she was sporting a laptop and I couldn't argue with a laptop. Much.

Off I went to get blood work done (oh, and I stopped by the desk and set up a follow-on appointment for a physical.. see? I can be taught!). Two days later I got a call from the doctor who said my PSA count was too high (double digits), and she directed me to go see a urologist immediately. OK, so I did that.

The urologist took a look at my labs, and then did the wonderful exam (the DRE, which stands for "digital rectal exam" and there are no laptops involved) and said he felt "nodules" which are not good, especially considering my PSA level. And so we set up a follow-on appointment to do a prostate biopsy (more on that in another post).

I started reading about prostate cancer, prostate function, prostate treatments, because other than the word and an idea of where it was located, I was a complete noob. Oh and for reference (because it's taken me awhile to get to creating this blog) this was late July, 2009... and the prostate biopsy was scheduled for August 4th.

Almost immediately I was overwhelmed by the amount of information on the web, but I was equally UNDERwhelmed by the specificity of the information. I didn't find much that would help a novice like me begin to navigate through the general stuff to something that applied to me. And I didn't have nearly all the information I needed, but I didn't know that. Yet.

One remark about the PSA (prostate-specific antigen) test. There's a fair amount of controversy about the test, especially for bicyclists like me, but one thing is for sure. It IS an indicator, and a change in levels may be something to check out. In my case, I didn't have a lot of data because I hadn't had it checked often... but the PSA score went from 3 to over 10 in the 5 years since I'd had it checked. D'oh!