Sometimes, doctor doesn’t know best: Men, be pro-active about your prostate
I felt great about turning 50. After six years, I had resigned my full-time job the day before my half-century birthday.
I wanted to spend my 50s doing different adventurous things. So I set up our exporting company and started flying regularly to China, Russia, Kazakhstan and Rwanda, to hustle and sell a range of products and do other projects in those countries.
And as I had turned 50, I thought I would get a health Warrant of Fitness. So I went to my GP and asked him to give me all the tests that I could possibly have.
I didn’t care what they were, I just wanted the lot.
However, when he came to tick the box for a PSA test, which can detect prostate cancer, his advice was that I should not have that test. He said you can get false positives and it can create unnecessary stress.
He put his hand on my shoulder
As he had been my doctor for quite some time, I acquiesced. He didn’t tick that PSA test box.
As it happened, my doctor moved on and it wasn’t until four years later that I did get a PSA test. I went to a new doctor for another matter and asked him to do one as an aside. A couple of weeks later, as I was leaving his consultancy room he said to me the PSA results had just come back.
It’s elevated he said. I asked what that meant. He said I needed to see a specialist.
So began my inconvenient truth. From there I had biopsies, MRIs, CT/PET scans, blood tests. Eventually I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Even more inconvenient, after further testing, it was confirmed that my cancer had spread beyond my prostate into my lymph system. This was an added risk and complication.
Obviously, it takes time for cancer to spread. And my cancer may have had four years to do just that.
More than 650 people a year die from prostate cancer, more than twice the 2020 road toll of 318.
Since diagnosis, I have had an operation, six months of chemotherapy, a couple of months of radiotherapy, and ongoing hormone therapy.
It is my inconvenient truth, but I don’t want it to be yours. So be proactive about your health.
It may or may not have made a difference if I had had my PSA tested when I did my Warrant of Fitness at 50. However, I do know that it would at least have given a baseline from which to measure. Logic suggests if I’d had a test that day, or in the next couple of years after that day, the cancer may have been detected earlier. Earlier detection simply leads to better treatment outcomes.
I would like to think that others might benefit from my experience. If you are a bloke and about 50, I would definitely suggest you get a PSA test.
Don’t get talked out of it.