Did you know this about prostate cancer? Volume 1.

Did you know?  From ” The Decision”

• · You have a higher incidence of bladder or rectal cancer after having received radiation.

• · Frank Zappa, Bill Bixby, and Dan Fogelberg died in their fifties from prostate cancer, all within three years of diagnosis.

• · One in six men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer at some point in his lifetime.

• · Prostate cancer is the most common cancer in men.

• · The reason the urologist will monitor the PSA after treatment with either form of therapy is that a PSA elevation over time is an indicator of recurrence of disease.

• · The PSA is sometimes unreliable in the diagnosis of prostate cancer, but it is an excellent marker in determining the recurrence of prostate cancer after treatment.

• · Prostate cancer is hereditary, so if your father has it, you need to be checked earlier and more often.

• · Annually, 40,000 women die of breast cancer; 25,000 men die of prostate cancer. Government funding for breast cancer is twice that for prostate cancer.
• · Prostate cancer is more common in African Americans and has a higher incidence of being more aggressive.

• · The ribbon for breast cancer is pink; the ribbon for prostate cancer is blue.

• · September is prostate cancer awareness month and designated as such in 2003 by President George Bush.

• · October is breast cancer awareness month and designated as such in 1985.

• · After the child bearing years the prostate has no other function than contributing to the fluid expressed at ejaculation.

• · When a man has a vasectomy or a prostatectomy his sex drive or libido, which is dependent on the male hormone testosterone, does not change. Testosterone is produced by the testicles and released into the blood stream and subsequently not affected, or its blood level diminished, by either procedure.

One of the oldest Urology jokes around involves a man coming to the Urology clinic for a vasectomy all dressed up in a tuxedo. When asked,” Why the formal attire?” he responds,” If I am going to be impotent, I’m going to look impotent.” The problem with this joke, as explained in the bullet above, is that a vasectomy makes you sterile (no sperm), it has no affect on potency. Potency refers to erectile function which is independent of fertility (which is what a vasectomy affects). I mention this because it is misconceptions like these which abound within the male population, and contribute to the “perfect storm” of delayed diagnosis alluded to earlier in this book. It is still a cute joke however.

• · The external sphincter, which is anatomically below the prostate, is not disturbed by the prostate’s removal.  The contraction of this muscle contributes to the feeling of climax and is usually not affected by a prostatectomy.

At a three month follow up visit, with a patient in whom I had removed his prostate, I asked if he had had sexual activity. He indicated that everything was working well but that his wife would no longer have sex with him. “When I climax now doc, I start to shuttering all over so bad that it scares my wife. She won’t have sex with me now, she’s afraid I’m going to hurt something.”