Patients share how rising PSA levels, urinary symptoms, and delayed evaluations ultimately led to their prostate cancer diagnoses. Their experiences highlight the importance of regular screening, acting on concerning symptoms, and moving quickly through the diagnostic process to begin treatment and explore specialized care.
Joe LaBella:
I had no idea what prostate cancer was about. I never had any problems like that before or anything for that matter. I've been bulletproof all my life. Coming from the background that I come from, I've had more than a few in the street. You get hit hard sometimes and it ain't how hard you get hit or how hard you fall, it's how you get up. When I got smacked with this one, I was like, "Whew. This is something that you never had to face before."
I wasn't prepared for it. I had nothing to prepare me for it. I think if I had known more about it, I may have been more attuned to getting tested more frequently. The fact that COVID was on... was a hurt because you weren't getting any attention at that point. Like I said, I had to do a virtual with the urologist the first time when it was at five. Then eight months later, it's at 175. Two weeks after that, it's 235.
So I'm like, "Okay. Well, this is not good. Whatever this is, it's pretty aggressive." So the next day, she had me down at the hospital doing the preliminary test and they booked me for biopsy. They did the biopsy. At that point, my daughter had made a phone call to a friend where I was going to the doctor there at the hospital, were involved with my primary care.
Dr. Sarda put me in touch with Dr. Barata. He read the biopsy, did preliminary tests with the blood. It was... My PSA levels at that point, this is two weeks later, was 235. So this was rolling which had my button knitting buttonholes. I was like, "Okay. We..." It was like getting clipped on the chin. I didn't get it. I fell to nothing before. I just worked through whatever I had.
John Gritzmacher:
I was diagnosed with prostate cancer two years ago. I was 69 but it was also COVID. Medical appointments were postponed and delayed and that was right around the time... That was August or July of 2020 when I was diagnosed or when I started the scans and I was diagnosed in August. My doctor appointment had been postponed. It was supposed to be earlier in the year and it was pushed back a few months. So some of those things may have affected it. I don't know. But that's also kind of in the back of my mind that that's one of the statistics, I believe, that COVID... that people don't really realize that it affected people's treatments and procedures with their doctors and with hospitals.
I found out that I had prostate cancer through my general practitioner, my doctor. We were watching my PSAs and they kept rising until, finally, they were close to seven when the doctor said, "Well, we need to take further steps." So I went through some scans and they found reason to do a biopsy. I did that. Through the urologist, he is the one that told me that I had cancer. At that time, I wasn't surprised because my PSAs had been going up. And so, I kind of anticipated that that would happen. My wife was there with me at the time.
John Wean:
I went by the urologic recommendations that at age 70 you stop checking your PSA so I liked that because I didn't want to get involved in that. I know that you get biopsies and all kinds of uncomfortable things. So I went merrily along without treating it. I just had trouble urinating and I thought, "Well, I'm 70 years old. It's natural to get a little BPH." And so, I... Of course, you always want to think it's that. And so, I self-prescribed some Flomax, alpha antagonist, to relax the sphincter of the bladder.
I got a little bit of relief from that, thought, "Oh, well, it looks like it's BPH." Of course, I was trying to convince myself that. I increased the dosage. It stopped working. Then, it really didn't work much at all. And so, I switched to Urotaraxal which was another choice that I did for a few weeks. That stopped working. Basically, I was doing my psychiatric practice and I couldn't urinate. Basically, it was just embarrassing.
And so, I figured I must have prostate cancer. I went to my colleague next door. She's a child psychiatrist and I said, "Could you write me a PSA?" She did and I went down to the Wisconsin lab there. It was 68, I believe, it was. So I thought, "Well, it's probably metastatic disease." I thought, "Here we go." And so, I sought the consultation of a urologist a few days later.
And then, he recommended an MRI and a biopsy, which I had done, a sextant, a six-pack of the biopsy and that showed a lot of disease. Five of the six cores were diseased with some 4 + 5 Gleason 9 on most of them. Only one biopsy was benign so it looked like things were real. The MRI showed us a lot of lymph node involvement in the pelvic sacrum around the whole sacral periprostate area and it also showed some metastases in the bones. And so I thought, "Whoa. I better get going on treatment."
Roland Bessette:
In January of this year, 2022, I had a blood drawer and everything and all of a sudden the doctor realized that it was 54. And so, at that point, he put me into it with a urologist. From there, what we did was we started to work with it and it seemed that one of the things that I think probably should be improved is the fact that, "Well, we can't do this because it's not going to be ready for two weeks before I can get the certain person in to run a certain test." So that kind of pushed it from January into February.
And then, as the testing became more evident that it would look like prostate cancer and then it was, "Well, okay. We're going to do a biopsy. Oh, it's not going to be ready for three weeks because they're behind," and those kind of things was how we really started with this. My urologist, he said, "Well, you know what? We're going to have to do a biopsy." And so, when he did the biopsy again, that was a couple more weeks. So by the time I actually got confirmed that I had prostate cancer was three months later near the end of March.
At that point, he had sent out... I had a meeting with him on what the biopsy was, how it was confirmed, and he said, "Well," he says, "it is prostate cancer and it's going quite a bit." He looked at me and he said, "What..." He says, "Are you okay?" I said, "Yeah. I'm okay." I says, "I assume you already got the plan and you're ready to go," and he looked at me and he said, "You're not going to complain that you shouldn't have prostate?" I says, "No, I have it. It's not going to change. Why should I sit here and cry? That's not going to help it." I said, "That's not going to make my prostate get better." I says, "Well, what is the plan?" He says, "I'm referring you to Dana-Farber."