Tuesday March 24, 1997 – Houston
Anyway I had
the next series of scans this morning – as usual it was said it would only take
ten minutes and as usual it took much longer – about an hour. J dropped us off
afterwards at the Galleria shopping centre where Rab bought another pair of
shoes! and where we had some excellent Mexican food for lunch.
From there
we started the medical meetings. First one was Hank Zalensky, medical
oncologist. What a character! He is a diver in the Naval Reserve
and talks the hind leg off a donkey. Told me he could judge a person’s age by
whether they had a VISCULA or not. That is a Visible Scar Upper Left Arm –
where we were vaccinated as kids. He finally got around to doing a full medical
examination, including yet another DRE! He was non-committal, although he said
the prostate was mobile and he could not feel anything specific apart from the
obvious swelling in the right hemisphere.
He arranged
for me to meet a radiation therapist in addition to the urologist who G
had set up. Brian Butler the radiologist was very pleasant (as they all were)
and set out clearly the options and his recommendation – to have a radical
prostatectomy! Again, though, when he examined me, he could not feel anything
specific, which would have changed my staging from T2b to T1c.
And so on to
the finale this morning with Seth Lerner the urologist. He kept us waiting for
over an hour and a half but was happy to spend as long as we wanted to discuss
what we wanted to know. He made no bones about the fact that an operation was
what I needed – and the sooner the better. He could not understand why I had
waited so long. He said that he could fit me into his schedule next week and
urged me to consider that option, saying that the MRI scan showed the tumour as
clearly a a streetlight on a dark night. Rab asked him to mark the relevant
scan so we could see this phenomenon. It was not obvious to us (or indeed to the oncologist in Cape Town when we got home). He quoted a fee of $20,000 - way beyond our resources.
I still do
not think that I will have the operation. The bye-products I think are too
potentially severe compared with the other options. I still think I have some
time to do more research, to consider all the options and to look more fully at
the alternatives.
Brian Butler
said he had never heard of any spontaneous regression of a prostate cancer, when I raised the subject with him. He did agree though that there were many instances of spontaneous regression in
other cancers. He had to laugh when I suggested that the surgeons did not give
an early stage PCA the chance of regressing before they whipped them out!
Wednesday March 25, 1997 – Houston
I didn’t write up my diary for this day, I guess because we were in a bit of a dwaal after having the bad news confirmed so unanimously. I know we spent a long time the night before and in the morning talking about options and potential outcomes - after a long chat
with J and G we took ourselves off for a little sightseeing in Houston.
Incidentally was Matt’s birthday. We
sent him a fax with my latest news - Happy Birthday, Matt!
The main target of our (or mor accurately, my) sightseeing was the NASA (National Air and Space Academy)
Museum with all the exhibits of the space shots to date. We had seen the first
Challenger flight taking off from what was Cape Kennedy (now reverted to Cape
Canaveral) when we were on a previous visit and it was quite an experience to
see the capsules and all the other exhibits.
Some deep thinkers may see some Freudian connection between the viewing of rockets and the likely outcome of any prostate surgery??????:-)
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