Hormone Therapy – Page 3 – Dan's Journey through Prostate Cancer

Okay, please indulge my personal curiosity. This is going to be an interactive post—there’s a pop quiz for some readers.

I’m 22 days and 8 or so hours—give or take—from my next PSA test. (But who’s counting??) And anyone who’s been diagnosed with prostate cancer already knows that there’s a ton of infuriatingly conflicting and confusing information about PSA out there.

Because my own post-surgery PSA has been creeping up in the last two years—meaning some sort of salvage therapy may be in my future—I’d like to ask other prostatectomy patients:

Below what PSA level does your medical team say PSA is “undetectable”?
At what PSA level does your medical team say that biochemical recurrence has occurred?
If you had biochemical recurrence, how long after hitting biochemical recurrence was it before you began salvage therapy?

To make it easier for you to respond, I’ve created a short survey for those who have had a prostatectomy and had their PSA return after surgery. It’s certainly not a scientific survey, but it will be interesting and perhaps educational to see the variance in the responses. If nothing else, it will be entertaining. Click the link below to take the survey:

PSA Threshold for Salvage Therapy Survey

Seriously, having this information available when I get my next PSA results may help me with the next conversation that I have with my medical team, so I thank you in advance for helping me understand what may be next for me.

I’ll share the results in next month’s post which will be shortly after I receive my PSA results from my 2 August 2017 blood draw.

I’ve been blogging for the last 80 months to maintain my own sanity, educate myself and others, and to increase prostate cancer awareness. I certainly don’t do it for recognition. I have to admit, however, that I was surprised to see my blog listed on a Top 50 Prostate Cancer blogs list by Feedspot.

I don’t post this to feed my ego (much), but by clicking on the image below, you’ll see the other websites and resources that are available as well.

It’s amazing how people in southern California forget how to drive when a little liquid sunshine falls from the sky. Focusing on the horrible traffic in the rain kept my mind off the discussion that I was about to have. As soon as I plopped into the chair in the waiting area, the anxiety level shot back up.

The good news is that I’m not an overreacting drama queen. The bad news is that the doctor shared my concern about the movement in the PSA, but with a significant caveat.

In March of this year (after my PSA test in January and before this one in September), the hospital switched over to using the new ultrasensitive PSA test, so comparing numbers from January to September may not be a direct apples-to-apples comparison. With the new test, some of her other patients are experiencing the same phenomenon–undetectable for years, and now coming in at 0.03 – 0.05 ng/ml with the new test.

She did say, however, that she was concerned enough that this “warrants watching” to try and figure out what’s really going on, and she wants me to return in three months. The September reading will, in essence, be a new baseline uPSA, and we’ll see what December’s has to offer.

Doing the test sooner (like this afternoon!) would be too early after the 2 September test. By waiting three months, we’ll get better insight into what’s happening and what the uPSA velocity may be if it continues upward. The faster the increase, the more urgent the need for subsequent treatment.

We did briefly discuss what would happen if there are signs of recurrence. One of the first things that may come into play is getting a bone scan to see if it has spread. We talked of salvage radiation therapy (SRT) and a little about hormone therapy as options when we get to that point. We didn’t go into a lot of detail on either, mainly because I didn’t press for a lot of detail at this point and virtually everything she said fell in line with the research that I had done. It’s far too early to be thinking in those terms because we don’t know what we’re dealing with yet.

I did mention the recent studies that indicated that a 0.03 ng/ml reading on a uPSA was showing itself as a predictor of biochemical recurrence, and she really didn’t offer any insights on that one way or the other.

It appears that I’m probably headed back to a quarterly testing schedule for a while until we figure out exactly what’s happened. Just a change in testing methodology? Rising PSA? Full moon?

My next appointment is 15 December. Merry Christmas!

Let the waiting begin.

[We now return you to our regular blog posting schedule, or at least until I have my next freak-out.]