Well, well, I do feel a bit of a fraud! I have just been reading through my previous post, written melodramatically, hours after the operation in the dark of night and with the anaesthetic still coursing through my veins, and here I am, barely a week later, just back from a very pleasant walk in the Surrey hills in delightful autumn sunshine, my second in two days! So how was the operation? What operation?
Well OK, that’s going a bit far in the opposite direction. But there is no doubt that the surgeon did originally have me a bit spooked! I’ve just been looking at the list of all the things that could have gone wrong, gleaned from a carbon copy of the consent form that I signed just before the op. Of course some things don’t change, like the doctor’s hand-writing and the fact that the organisation not only still uses carbon copies (!), but also keeps the original for itself (patient, know thy place!). The list of things that could have gone wrong wouldn’t fit into the space available, so he scrunched it all up into an even more impenetrable jumble of illegible hieroglyphics. It’s probably just as well that I couldn’t decipher it all or I would have been even more of a raving hypochondriac.
Not only was I out of hospital the day after the operation, just hours after I wrote the original note, but I was back in to have the pipes removed barely five days later. Even that was a non-event. The Urology Practice Nurse just let the water out of the balloon that held the catheter inside my bladder and then just pulled the tube out of my tummy! She didn’t even stitch the wound! She told us that the body would seal the hole all by itself and all I’ve got to show for it is a small dressing that I need to change on a daily basis (and a new tummy button)!
Of course, some of the side-effects may not show up for a couple of weeks yet, depending on whether there is any damage to blood vessels around some of the organs in the vicinity of the prostate, but I feel sure that this won’t be a problem. With all systems already functioning better than I could possibly have anticipated, I think it is all over bar the celebrating! And the surgeon doesn’t even want to see me again until 9th November, so he can’t be very concerned!
Which does bring me on to the question of whether the treatment will actually work? My problem is that my cancer was quite advanced when first diagnosed in 2003, with a good chance that it had already moved beyond the prostate itself. It was too late for them to take the prostate out and so I was given a serious dose of radiotherapy and put on indefinite hormone treatment. Things seemed to be OK until earlier this year when my PSA (a prostate cancer indicator) started ominously to rise from a very low base. My urologists recommended HIFU (High Intensity Focused Ultrasound) as a non-invasive treatment to kill any cancer still resident in my prostate, and I have just been through this procedure.
The trouble is, prior to going into hospital, they did a bone scan which showed an area on my sacra-ileac joint that might be, or might not be, a “hotspot”. The radiologist won’t confirm it and the advice is to wait and see.....
There is no use in second guessing this, so I might as well get on with my life!
This will include getting back to walking; and thinking about other things along the way...
No comments:
Post a Comment