patients get diagnosed in many different ways. there's not one path through which a diagnosis occurs.ultimately something abnormal is either felt or identified on some kind an imaging test. so an ultrasound ora chest x-ray or a cat scan. and to make a diagnosis of cancer you need pathology, you need tissue and that requires a biopsy. i went in for just my standardannual physical checkup. and as part of thatprocess, the prostate is checked out
and it was enlarged. so that raised the alarm bells. so we went off tothe hospital and had the samples taken and that determined that there wascancer there so we proceeded from there. we use staging, it's somewhat historical and it doeshave some meaning when we look at statistics in terms of what the overall survival is, what we call the disease-free survival so
how successful treatment is. usually we look at the 5-year mark and thehigher the stage, in general, the less likely that we're going to have a cure iflooking for cure. and the overall prognosis, overall survival, tends to be lower withmore advanced stage disease. it's really more about the behavior andthe biology of the disease that helps us estimate or guesstimate whatthe risk of recurrence is and how aggressive one needs to be in terms oftreating
a particular type cancer. treatment is quite variable and isdetermined in part by the type of cancer that apatient has and the stage of the cancer. so there'sgenerally a number different modalities that weuse in treating cancer. there's surgery, where surgery isindicated, to remove a primary tumour. there may be a role for chemotherapy, which are medications that we give often intravenously but sometimes in the form of a pill
that may shrink the existing tumour and may be used toprevent the cancer from coming back. there's radiation treatment which isoften used to prevent the cancer from recurring although it isused in advanced cancer to treat specific symptoms. i had about 5 weeks of radiation and atthe same time i was taking chemotherapy tablets so that was thefirst step in my treatment. following that, i came back to north yorkgeneral and i had i surgery on may 7th. that was difficult, just getting over that
because i had major surgery. but following that i started chemotherapy in june for 8 sessions and that wascompleted in october of 2012. there's a group of hormonal therapies that we use in somecancers, particularly in breast cancer and prostate cancer. the hormone treatment is the big ugly needle they stick in your abdomen. it's a little uncomfortable but it's notbad.
that was every 3 months i went down for that, for 3 or 4 of those treatments and that was extremelyeffective, brought it back down to zero. so we just kept monitoring the psa, and we still are. really the question is: what is the roleof treatment? is it in early-stage cancer in whichcase chemotherapy is being used to preventthe cancer from coming back, similarly with radiation to prevent thecancer from coming back. patients may get treated every 2 weeks,
every 3 weeks, every 4 weeks andthey may get 4 months of treatment or6 months of treatment depending on the type of cancer, it would depend on the pathology the characteristics of the cancer thatdetermine which regimen which group of drugs we use for a particular cancer and that also will determine the frequency of the treatment. the outcomes really depend on what your starting point is. if youstart off with a disease that's incurable,
then those patients are deemed palliative just because they're incurable,but they may live for many years and they may live for many years withgood quality of life. for patients who have earlier stagedisease, stage 1, stage 2 and in some cancer stage 3disease, the goal of treatment is cure. and so one is hopeful that with whatevermodalities are felt to be indicated, that patients will become disease free and the cancerwill not reoccur.
patients who've completed their treatmentneed some form a follow-up. the follow-up and the type of surveillance that is indicated will be determined by thetype that of cancer they have. at a certain point that surveillance may stop for the original cancer. but patients should continue to seetheir family physician, to have annual health checkups. if they are concerned aboutnew symptoms they need to bring that to the attention of their physicians.
i have a mammogram every year and then i also have anmri every year but alternating 6-months. i see my oncologist still once a year. i don'tsee my family doctor with any extra regularity. i was seeing the surgeon also trying to do that every 6 monthsso that i space it out with my oncologist. do i think about it coming back?sometimes, only because i have so much more of my life ahead ofme. i was really young. i don't think of it as ablessing.
i don't think of it as anything really.it was just something that happened and i just continueliving.
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