Geoff’s Story – Prostate Cancer Treatment

It’s a pretty well established fact that one man dies of prostate cancer every 45 minutes in the UK and of course there’s countless more that get diagnosed with prostate cancer.

In my case, I had some early indications of prostate trouble, although at the time I didn’t realise that it was prostate trouble. I visited my GP and had a very good response and service.

The early symptoms were fairly common in men of my age or the age I was, the early 60s. I was relatively fit, healthy, had a reasonable lifestyle, but found I was increasingly having to get up during the night to go to the bathroom and having some fairly recurrent infections, bladder infections that were very very uncomfortable. But with treatment, with antibiotics, and with frequent checks I got through a lot of that.

It still manifested itself in having to use the bathroom quite frequently. The interesting thing about persevering with the diagnosis is that you don’t actually feel that it’s getting any worse because it’s a constant degeneration of the situation that one day is very much like the day before, or the month before, or the two months before, and it just got to a point with me that I thought, well this doesn’t seem to be getting any worse but I better get it checked anyway.

I went to the GP, had a blood test literally on Tuesday and had a call from the doctor directly on Wednesday to say “I think you need to come in and see me”. It was the PSA test that had gone from a relatively normal figure to a very high figure in a very short period of time because I had PSA tests every 12 months before that just to keep an eye on it. So, it had accelerated quite badly, increased quite badly.

I went to KIMS Hospital to visit the surgeon, and went through a series of further tests to finally diagnose through an MRI scan and a biopsy that indeed I did have a tumour in the prostate. There were several things that they could do about it and I went through with the surgery two or three months later on November 5th, which is pretty difficult to forget and very relevant to Men’s Health in November as well, although it wasn’t planned that way.

I think the importance of the message really is that once there are symptoms seem to be there or there is certain characteristic things that happen to men, is to get it checked because it doesn’t take time to get it checked whatever the check is; it’s a self-check or it’s a blood test or it’s a physical test. It really isn’t that difficult to do that and in many cases it’s not cancer, many cases it’s treatable in other ways but if it is cancer best to get it done as early as possible.

Since the awareness I do know of men younger than I am, younger than when it was first diagnosed that haven’t been getting checked and unfortunately lost their lives through it, relatively quickly, as well as men get older it’s almost half expected that it’s going to happen but certainly in men 10,15, 20 years younger than me it’s a dreadful thing to find that you’ve left it too late.