Wednesday, May 21, 2008

9 Days After Surgery...

Its been a few days since the catheter was removed and that was a relief. I think that the nurse didn't want to tell me how much it would hurt coming out though. She gave me the old: "Take a deep breath and it won't hurt" routine. Yeah, right! That was like murder but it came out with minimal bleeding. My pelvic floor muscles are sore as hell from all of what I have been going through surgery-wise. I am wearing depends now but the leakage isn't too bad. Standing up or squatting causes some leakage at times or coughing but this all seems to pass in a few months.

Yesterday and today I got my pathology report back. It wasn't as perfect as I had hoped. The cancer was larger than we thought. It was bilateral, on both sides, and 70% of the prostate was cancerous. The original biopsy showed it to be only 20%. My lymph nodes tested negative as did my seminal vesicles for cancer. It was all contained. I had a positive margin, which isn't what you want to hear, but only a microscopic dot was on the margin. There is a chance that the additional tissue removal and cauterizing could have wiped out any part that was beyond that.

Originally they thought that I had a T1C cancer but it turns out that it was a T2C, still contained to the prostate. I will have to monitor my PSA for the rest of my life to make sure that it doesn't come back. If the PSA rises we will know where to radiate because of the microdot that was found. Time to move on with life and to keep moving forward! I'm going to live but will have to watch this forever. It will suck to relive this every few months when I go in for my testing but at least I'm alive. They did tell me that if they wouldn't have caught it now and I would have waited till I was 45, normal testing age, I would not have been a candidate for surgery as it would have spread too much. Thank God for my obsessiveness!

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