What’s So Important about Prostrate Health?

This is an article written by my high school friend, Mr. Paul Parks. I have multiple friends and family members who have been dealing with elevated numbers from their PSA test so I asked Paul if I could share this article with you. He said, “That’s why I wrote it. To see if I could help others in similar situations..” So this article comes to you from a fellow graduate from MCHS.

This is a Public Service Announcement about Prostate Specific Antigen, which is an indicator of prostate cancer.

About eight years ago, I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. And it wasn’t the common, slow-growing type — it was the kind that grows fast.

Before that, I’d been living in Colorado. Around 2012, about the time we were selling our business and getting ready to move, I went in for my annual physical. They do the usual routine — talk to you, check you out, then send you to the lab to pull blood and run the standard tests. If something’s wrong, the doctor calls you. It’s a small community clinic, with a hospital attached, where you go for the bloodwork.

The next year I went back, the doctor told me my previous PSA was 3.8, up from 2.1 the year before. “But it’s not over 4,” she said, “so I wouldn’t worry about it yet.” She mentioned it can be elevated by all kinds of things — riding a bike, having sex, you name it.

About that time, my wife and I sold the lodge and bought a big camper. We were going to travel around in it, and we did, for a couple of years. I’ll admit this part of the story is on me — I didn’t go back to that doctor for a while. But she didn’t call me either, about that last test. After a couple of years on the road, we settled in the Tampa, Florida area, bought a house, and I figured I’d better go get a physical.

I went to a new doctor, one I’d never seen before — my insurance gave me a list, and I picked the woman. She gave me a thorough exam. I liked her. She had small fingers. The blood test had been done before the physical, and when she pulled up the PSA number, it was 7.1. “That’s pretty high,” she said. We could monitor it, or I could see a urologist.

That’s when everything came back to me — the jump in PSA three years before, and the fact that I’d never heard back about that last test in Colorado. When I got home, I looked up the records from that hospital. Sure enough, it had been somewhere around 6.3 or 6.4. Nobody ever called.

A trip to the urologist confirmed the PSA had crept up further, and he said we needed to check whether it was cancer. That didn’t surprise me.

For anyone who’s never had it done — checking for prostate cancer means a biopsy, and that biopsy is not a walk in the park. I won’t get into the details, but I’ll tell you this. I went in for the procedure with a prescription for one Valium, to take beforehand. I figured if they’re giving me Valium, this is going to be intense. I put on the gown, laid down on the table like the nurses told me to, and as I lay there, the Valium starting working on me and I finally figured out exactly how this biopsy was going to be performed. Embarrassed, I looked at the nurse and said, “I’m sorry you have to do this.”

She didn’t even look up. “Honey, you’re procedure is the twelfth one I’ve done today.”

Then came the waiting. Anytime you’re dealing with the Big C, you worry, and then you worry some more. Waiting can be the hardest part — though in my case, not for long. The following week, I sat down across from the urologist, a blunt man who didn’t waste time. “There’s no easy way to tell you this,” he said. “So I’m just going to spit it out. You have prostate cancer.”

No matter how minor or major, hearing those words knocks the wind out of you. It sure did me.

The first thing I asked him was what my options were. “If you were my father,” he said — I was older than him for the record — “I’d tell you the same thing I’d tell him. Let me surgically remove it.” I trusted him, and I agreed to do it. I asked about side effects. He said he wasn’t worried about side effects — he was worried about beating the cancer.

Surgery or Not?

I’d signed up for the surgery and was ready to go through with it. But then my friend Gerry pulled me aside. We’d been talking — me and a few other guys — about the diagnosis and what came next, and Gary said, “Paul, you ought to think this through some more. I’ve got friends who had it removed surgically, and friends who did radiation instead. I did the radiation myself, and it went well — minimal long-term side effects, and it’s effective.”

That conversation made me slow down and get a second opinion — maybe even a third. The next urologist told me it was entirely my choice, surgery or radiation. Eventually, I chose radiation, and I went to Tampa Bay Radiation Oncology, to a doctor named Dr. Steele.

Dr. Steele reviewed all my records and ran more tests — an MRI, among others — to see how far the cancer had spread within the prostate, which the biopsy had indicated it had. He laid out a detailed plan with a few options. The core of it: twenty-five targeted radiation treatments, followed a month later by the implantation of sixty-four radioactive seeds directly into the prostate. One option on the table was taking a female hormone for six months prior to the initial radiation. I opted in. Anything that improved my odds, I was all for it.

I didn’t know what to expect from the hormone — I can’t even remember its actual name now — but I was given it once a month for six months. Some things that happened during that stretch were funny. Some weren’t.

Dr. Steele warned me about possible side effects — enlargement of my pectorals, hot flashes, and once I stopped taking it, possibly even something like menopausal symptoms.

Living with cancer means worrying about it constantly. But treating it with humor sometimes relieves the pressure. Here’s a story I still think is funny. I’d been on the hormone two or three months when I found, sitting in the bathroom trash can, a couple of padded liners — the kind out of a bathing suit top, or maybe a bra. About an inch thick, made of foam. I pulled them out, slipped them up under my shirt against my new and improved pecs, and walked into the living room where Debbie was watching TV. I smoothed my shirt out, stuck my chest out a little, and said, “Debbie, do you think my breasts have grown some?”

She looked up. Her eyes went wide. “Do you?”

I pulled them out and showed her, and we both had a good laugh — after she hit me a couple of times for tricking her. She doesn’t love being tricked.

So to all the menopausal women out there — you don’t have anything on me. I went through it too.

Back to Florida

After a few months in Colorado — which is a genuinely good place to take your mind off something serious; it’s hard to think about cancer while you’re hiking, riding ATVs, and floating rivers — it was time to head back to Florida for the radiation.

Going into that first treatment, I had no idea what to expect. Some bizarre light show, maybe, beams streaming into me from every direction. After some prep work I won’t get into, they laid me on a machine that looked something like an MRI but wasn’t, they wheeled me in, and centered me inside a big circular ring. The ring started spinning, and I thought, oh God, here we go. I kept waiting to see beams of light shooting into my body. But of course, radiation’s invisible. They told me the beams themselves were smaller than a pencil lead, firing into me from different angles as the machine rotated, all converging on the apex of the prostate. I did this five days a week for five weeks, twenty-five sessions total. It never hurt. Completely painless, completely invisible. And, as I’d later learn, completely effective.

About a month after finishing that, I went back to see Dr. Steele to talk about the seed implant. He walked me through it. First off, I’d be asleep, which I was very grateful to hear. But in the room with me, in addition to him and his assistant, would be a nuclear scientist and a representative from the government — because those seeds, tiny as they were, could theoretically be used, in sufficient quantity, to build a dirty bomb.

I had quite an audience that day and never even knew it. I went to sleep, woke up, and there was nobody around but the usual nurses and caretakers. Dr. Steele told me the seeds would reach half-life in a few months, but in the meantime I’d technically be radioactive. “Don’t hold any small pets in your lap,” he said. “Don’t hold any kids in your lap. Just be careful.”

It was serious, and it worried me some. But that night, I needed a little more fun.

Getting ready for bed, I went out to the garage and grabbed a glow stick — one of those things that glows green or orange or yellow once you snap it, the kind kids wear around their necks and divers tie to their tanks so they’re visible underwater at night. I happened to have one lying around.

When we went to bed, Debbie was already under the covers. I walked into the bedroom, turned off the light so it was pitch black, snapped the glow stick, and tucked it into my waistband. Then I walked toward her. All she could see coming at her in the dark was an eerie greenish glow.

For a few seconds, she genuinely thought I was glowing from the radiation. She gasped, nearly choked on her own uvular, and then I heard it: “Paul, you idiot.”

I laughed. Climbed into bed, pulled the sheet up over both of us, glow stick still tucked in my waistband, lighting the sheet up from underneath. She got up, grabbed her phone, and took a few pictures — which I then sent out to close friends along with the whole story. They got a kick out of it.

It was getting close to Thanksgiving by the time all the seeds were in and everything was done. We were doing a turkey, of course. I had it out, prepping it to go in the oven, and instead I carried it into the living room, sat down in my chair, and set the pan right on my stomach. Debbie wandered in. “What are you doing?”

“Cooking the turkey,” I told her. “It’s basically a microwave at this point, with the radiation.”

It was sitting in a tin pan. She looked at me and said, “Well, it’s not gonna work in that aluminum pan. The radiation won’t go through it.” I think she’d caught onto my sense of humor by then.

More time passed. I went back to see Dr. Steele, who ran more tests — another PSA, another physical — and he declared me cancer-free.

I just had a PSA test recently, and it came back at 0.01. Cancer-free. That’s what prompted this — I guess you’d call it a podcast, except it’s not a podcast, it’s a public service announcement, as I’m calling it. I’ve been cancer-free for eight years now.

If even one person reads this and decides to go get a physical, that’s the point of writing it. If a woman reads this and thinks, my husband needs to go to the doctor, or thinks of a friend who’s been putting off their yearly physical — make them go to the doctor. It saved my life. Barely.

I’ve known a number of men who didn’t catch it in time. And I’ll say this, even though I’m no doctor: prostate cancer is one of the easiest cancers to cure if it’s caught early. It’s also the most common cancer among men, aside from skin cancer — and if you’re getting skin cancer from being out in the sun all the time, well, that one’s on you. But if prostate cancer escapes the prostate and spreads through the body, it can become a death sentence. It can be managed for a while, but once it’s out, it’s eventually terminal.

So get off your asses and go get that PSA test and physical. It just may save your life! And pick yourself a woman doctor.

They’ve got smaller fingers.