August 6th, 2009: My urologist called me at work to tell me that the biopsy showed "fairly aggressive" cancer in a significant number of samples taken (7 of 12). He set up a time that afternoon for me to come in to discuss the next steps. At that point, I learned some new words, "Gleason score" being one. I recall being numb... and somehow not surprised, but I don't know why I felt unsurprised. The doctor said we'd need to run a couple of other scans before going any further, and we didn't need to take any more steps until we did those - a CT scan of the pelvic area, and a full-body bone scan. Once we had the results of those, we'd set up a consult appointment and talk about next steps.
On the way out I talked to someone who helped get the scan appointments set up. We got a slot the following day for the CT scan (amazing!) and on August 15th for the bone scan.
Showing posts with label prostate cancer diagnosis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prostate cancer diagnosis. Show all posts
Monday, October 19, 2009
Thursday, October 15, 2009
An Introduction: The Prostate Chronicles
I intend to chronicle my experiences and thoughts as a prostate cancer patient... from discovery to where I am now, and throughout the course of treatment I chose to follow.
Some of this will be lighthearted... because that's one of the ways I deal with hard information. Please forgive me if they offend. I don't mean any harm to anyone. Cancer, any kind of cancer, may not be a thing to joke about. But some things that surround it are funny, or at least they seem easier for me to handle if I can laugh at them one way or another. Some humor, after all, comes from pain.
For example, several of the medical procedures have some bizarre aspects to them that make sense and have a purpose to the medical professional, I'm sure, but to the patient they might seem, well, funny. Or at least odd, which ended up making me laugh a bit.
Other aspects are incredibly serious or frustrating, or both, and I'll try to come up with a method of identifying the humorous ones from the serious stuff. My hope is that this will be useful to someone else, besides just being a random ramble on the web, adding to the noise. And hopefully it won't be the proverbial tale told by an idiot. <grin>
So... with that introduction, let's begin...
Some of this will be lighthearted... because that's one of the ways I deal with hard information. Please forgive me if they offend. I don't mean any harm to anyone. Cancer, any kind of cancer, may not be a thing to joke about. But some things that surround it are funny, or at least they seem easier for me to handle if I can laugh at them one way or another. Some humor, after all, comes from pain.
For example, several of the medical procedures have some bizarre aspects to them that make sense and have a purpose to the medical professional, I'm sure, but to the patient they might seem, well, funny. Or at least odd, which ended up making me laugh a bit.
Other aspects are incredibly serious or frustrating, or both, and I'll try to come up with a method of identifying the humorous ones from the serious stuff. My hope is that this will be useful to someone else, besides just being a random ramble on the web, adding to the noise. And hopefully it won't be the proverbial tale told by an idiot. <grin>
So... with that introduction, let's begin...
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