Thursday, April 19, 2012

What do Men with Prostate Cancer Actually Want?


That’s easy—survival, survival, survival

For anybody with a serious, incurable disease (such as prostate cancer in case you’re wondering) survival is a pretty important life priority.

Laboratory research, new drugs in process, scholarly articles, and a multitude of clinical trials focus on the statistics, significance, percentages, averages, etc. But for each one of us with the Big C, it’s all about how any of this affects us. I want to survive and continue to be active, alert (moderately), and more or less healthy. 

I don’t much care what the name of the drug is, who manufactures it, its overall effectiveness, or whether it comes in pill form, injection, or IV. If it works for me—at least for a while—that’s what matters.

You’ve probably noticed that what helps manage one person’s cancer may be totally ineffective for someone else. So, as far as I’m concerned the more choices the better. In just the past six months I’ve been on and off seven different meds to find a combination that might slow my PSA progression. It appears that the current group is doing the job (hooray). Sometimes it’s a matter of being patient enough for the process to work and the right combination to be found (I hate being patient but it seems to work).


axman



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