Bugster2 wrote:I am sorry about your husband. I didn't know he had cancer. What kind is it? Seems like so many people are getting the dreaded disease. My sister had stage 4 colon cancer but by the grace of God, a good surgeon and the City of Hope, she beat it. It has been over 15 years so I guess she is cured.
Brian got prostate cancer in 2000 and had his prostate removed immediately. Since then, over the last 17 years, his PSA has gone up, which means cancer cells escaped from the prostate prior to removal. So after a couple years, he had radiation. Then a couple years later, he got more treatment. Then he developed prostate cancer on his spine (not bone cancer but prostate cancer on his spine; it’s better if it’s not another kind of cancer and remains the same kind). He progressed to different treatments and they were eventually able to do radiation again, trying to hit the stuff on his spine. They can’t radiate in the same place and a second bout of radiation is not too common. Then he went on the final available treatment, which is female hormones, which also worked for a couple of years. And yes, he got hot flashes!
The female hormones stopped working about a year ago and that’s pretty much all the “recognized” treatment. Luckily for us, several years ago he began seeing the oncologist who is considered the premier researcher into this stage of prostate cancer: In other words, he’s been trying for years to develop a treatment for those for whom the female hormones stop working. Usually at this point in time, they hope that someone dies from either old age or another malady before the prostate cancer kills him.
So Brian has been going through all kinds of treatment for the last couple of years. He recently completed one where they removed his blood, sent it off somewhere to be “radiated,” and then returned it and he had to get it back inside of him before 72 hours was up. After that, he got radiation shots for a while, and recently finished those. It was this treatment when he lost his appetite and lost 50 pounds (he’s 6’4” and he now weighs 202). He was a little overweight before but he’s pretty slim now, though he still looks good. When someone sees him who hasn’t seen him in a while, though, it’s really noticeable. His clothes were swimming on him so we recently got him a bunch of new dress shirts (he usually wears long sleeved cotton button-down shirts), a new sports coat, a new suit, new dress pants, new jeans, new casual slacks, new sweaters and just ‘cause he needed them, new shoes! Luckily, his shoe size didn’t change, as everything else did!
Looks like the radiation treatment might be working, as his PSA stopped going up but now it needs to start coming down again for it to be a success. He’s still getting a female hormone shot in his stomach every so often, I think every quarter, I think. But his doctor still wanted to put him on that other cancer drug; the Johnson & Johnson Foundation finally agreed to pay his $2700 monthly copay, so he took his first pill this morning. It’s very important that he take the cancer pill at the same time as he takes a steroid, and he has to take it on an empty stomach.
Luckily, though, he can drink coffee once he takes the two pills, so it conforms with our normal morning routine of coffee an hour or two before either one of us eats anything. I’d have felt so bad if he couldn’t have coffee while I was having mine, you know? We put a lot of stock in coffee down here in New Orleans; I think we’re one of the top coffee-drinking cities in fact, even with the heat of our summer. And it’s also our favorite time of the day, as I set up the coffee pot before we go to bed and then one of us goes down in the morning and brings up two cups so we have our first cup and usually a second cup while we sit in bed, read the paper and watch the Today Show. This morning, it’s really pretty, unusually cool for us (low 60s to start the day, in the low 70s now) and low humidity, so we have the French doors open to our balcony off our bedroom. It’s truly a glorious day with blue blue skies and not a cloud anywhere around. The Mississippi River is pretty high right now and at daybreak, the river looked pink and light blue reflecting the sky at that time. It won’t last long, just until tomorrow afternoon, before the heat and the humidity come back, probably for the duration of the summer. But we’re enjoying it today!
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