Patients share advice for navigating a prostate cancer diagnosis, emphasizing the importance of early screening, asking questions, trusting your medical team, and advocating for your own care. They encourage others to maintain a positive mindset, lean on family and friends for support, and stay focused on living well throughout treatment.
Glenn Ritchie:
It doesn't define you. The cancer is just a disease. It can be cured. I have great faith in God and Jesus Christ and I was able to hand this off to them and feel at peace through the whole process; to feel comfortable that I wasn't going to die, that healing would be complete, that my life would go back to normal.
I've always said that stress and worry will kill me long before fatty foods or cancer. Stress is not a positive thing so you need someone to talk to. You need to talk to a loved one if possible or a friend or your doctor, but you have to ask the questions that are on your mind. And guys, that means talking about sex and that means talking about your prostate and that means talking about the things that we're not comfortable doing, but it's important.
Craig Deatherage:
Five years ago when I was diagnosed with Stage IV prostate cancer, I didn't know what a prostate was, to be honest.
I didn't know what it was shaped like. I kind of understood that a doctor checked it in the finger wave process, but that had only happened to me three times since I turned 50. I wasn't entirely sure what he was after, what he was checking for.
No doctor ever sat me down and said, "Hey, this is what we're doing with this process. This is what we're looking for, an enlarged or an oddly shaped prostate. This is what your prostate should look like," inside one of their little medical models that they have sitting in offices. Simply never had that conversation with a doctor.
So would've loved to have known what is that? Because now it sounds like it could kill me, but I have no idea what we're talking about. What I really think is if I was going to go back and relive Craig Deatherage, I would probably care a lot more about men's health in general and educating myself more about the internal parts of my body more than the external parts of my body.
You work out and you care about whether or not your muscles are in shape or whether I'm going to have a beard or not have a beard or all the superficial external stuff. But we don't pay enough attention as men and I'm generalizing, but I just don't believe we pay enough attention.
We ought to be drawing men in for group discussions. Hey, let's bring a couple hundred men into a room and just run through the cardiovascular system or run through whatever systems in the body that men tend to suffer from and need to maintain in an intelligent way throughout their lives in order to have a good quality of life in retirement.
And I would say my takeaway is that I wouldn't have ignored so much about the inside of my body before the diagnosis ever happened. My urologist, my radiologist, my oncologist, everybody, my pain management folks, they all say, "You've got to be your best advocate." They say, "Don't be a hero. Don't suffer needlessly because you're not doing it to anybody but yourself."
But the truth is you're doing it to more than yourself. You're doing it to your family too.
John Burke:
My advice, which I hope you've been paying attention or like were enthralled by the previous part of this film, is that almost like develop yourself into two personalities. You have one here is the patient and one person here is the person who's going to direct.
Don't reach out for speculative analyses. Don't tell people that are not of this specific business even though you're tempted to tell them because maybe you want sympathy or maybe you want people to just understand what you're enduring, but don't do it.
Stick to facts. Develop a relationship with whatever procedure that you decide upon and devote yourself to those people. Devote yourself to those people and what they've laid out for you and just hope that they are in it as much as you are. And I found that with ... It took me all those mistakes to get that far. That's the advice I would give.
I would say stay healthy. Be the best patient you can be. Don't get sedate of the mind or of the body because then you're just succumbing. You're giving yourself an excuse. Don't think like you're going to will this out of your body. It's a medical procedure. It's a scientific procedure. It needs to be done. Don't shy away from it. Confront it the same way you would if somebody were confronting you and infringing upon you, ready to take something from you, then you need to be the best opponent that you can provide.
That would be my advice. That would be my best advice.
Scott Evenson:
Friends that treat you the same as you did before diagnosis is great. Some friends will be like, "Oh, how you doing?" And that kind of gets a little old and you just want them to treat you like any other day. And that's the only advice I could give for those who are supporting a prostate cancer patient. Show support when you need to, but then treat them like anybody else. Don't even focus on it. We're focusing on the day and what we're doing.
Jerry Marcello:
I guess the most important thing I could say is maybe at a certain age, I don't know what that age would be, but maybe 50, is go to your family doctor every six months or every 12 months. So if they see any signs of you having problems with your prostate, then get it tended to early. And I think that would be the most important thing as a lay person that I would tell them.
Roland Bessette:
Stay positive. Have a sense of humor. I mean, sometimes it's hard for some people, but I could joke about, "Yeah, coming in, don't forget I really like those cookies so make sure you got those and stuff." If you do that, it's going to make it easier for you. It's going to make it easier for the people around you. And if you can't make people laugh, I mean, these are tough times. Yeah, it was 154. Oh, now it's 0.009. I mean, so I'm well underneath the average.
So it can work, but you got to do what the doctor says. You can't do things just because you think it's right. You just do it because this is what's supposed to be going on. And this all started in January. Everything got put together for the first week of May and here it is, it's October and yep, I feel really good.
And so there's always going to be somebody that you know that probably didn't want to talk about it, but you can now and it makes it easier. I mean, I'm not proud that I have it. I'm happy that we've got it to a point where they can manage it now and I will be around for a few years.
But it's like everything else. Your state of mind actually influences your body and people don't realize that. And I just really feel that if I'm not going to be positive, what's the point? You need to push forward. And so you had trouble. I had like a catheter in for two months. Yeah. Well, don't have it anymore. Don't need it anymore. And things, if you do what you're supposed to do, you'll come out and you'll be fine.
Really do what people ask you to do and just go attack it. Don't let it attack you, you attack it.