While waiting for my biopsy results, I did scare myself by doing a bit of research on treatments. Many alternatives exist. The most proven one is an open radical prostatectomy or RP. In the hands of a very experienced surgeon, this method has the best long term cure rates and among the best success rates for [...]
It’s now three weeks since my biopsy and I’m pretty much back to normal. All of the annoying side effects are finally gone. I am really not looking forward to ever having another biopsy. It wasn’t horrible, but definitely not something I wish to repeat. In other recent news:
From the New York Times-
The PSA blood [...]
A biopsy can’t rule out prostate cancer. Some men have 2, 3 or even more biopsies before they finally detect cancer. Sometimes, they just miss it, because the major flaw inherent in using a biopsy to search for cancer is that it only samples a very small percentage of the prostate tissue. It’s also possible that there was no cancer [...]
Great news! My biopsy was negative for cancer. I’m also very glad it only took a little over a week, as I was told it could take 2-3 weeks. The waiting is not fun; it’s on your mind very frequently. Now, I get to put it out of my head for at least 6 months [...]
After I got home from my trip to the NIH, I faxed in the form needed to get a copy of my MRI results. Three business days later, I received a packet in the mail with a paper copy of my MRI report, X-ray report, blood tests, urine tests and other lab results (the biopsy pathology report [...]
You’ll probably get a care sheet from your urologist. Maybe you found a website with a list of possible side effects on the internet. Beyond that, there aren’t a lot of reports with personal experiences from a prostate biopsy. Probably for obvious reasons. Most guys don’t want to talk about it. Some are just too tough or too cool [...]
The prostate MRI like the one I had is not unique. I mentioned in an earlier blog that a urologist in Florida does 3T MRI screenings for a fee, some of which is paid by insurance. This is also an area with clinical research, such as the study I entered at the NIH. I was told that I [...]
My TRUS/MRI fusion biopsy is now over and the joy of waiting 2-3 weeks for the pathology results begins. The good news is that Dr. Pinto thought it was very unlikely there would be any findings, given all my results so far. In addition, he said they were unable to reproduce the dark (hypoechoic) region that [...]
From the beginning, the pretense of my blog has been that many biopsies are probably unnecessary, given the sheer number that are done (about a million a year) and the large percentage that turn up negative. I didn’t have any “smoking gun” that indicated I was at risk, other than a PSA level that was somewhat high for [...]
I have a summary of results from my 3 Tesla high resolution MRI, given to me by one of Dr. Pinto’s associates. I am told this included a T2-weighted (T2W) 3T MRI scan. If I understood correctly, they also took scans with spectroscopy (MRIS) and then with diffusion weighting (DWI) as well and finished with contrast [...]