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Survivor guilt (?)

Prostate Cancer | Last Active: 22 hours ago | Replies (45)

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Profile picture for brianjarvis @brianjarvis

I was fortunate that I first heard about prostate cancer and PSA testing in the mid-90s when I came across articles similar to these (see attached).

It was then that I committed to getting annual PSA tests when I turned 45y (in 2000). So, exactly 1 week after my 45th birthday, I had my first PSA test (it was 1.3 ng/mL).

If it was going to happen, my goal was to catch prostate cancer early. About 12 years later (at 56y), I was diagnosed with low-grade, localized prostate cancer.

If I hadn’t seen those articles in the mid-1990s, not sure how I’d be doing today.

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Replies to "I was fortunate that I first heard about prostate cancer and PSA testing in the mid-90s..."

That worked out well! It's great that you caught it early, while it was still low grade. ❤️

The type I'm talking about isn't the one that starts low-grade and develops later, but the one that starts already at the top of the scale (Gleason 8 or 9), is maybe near the outside of the prostate (??just guessing on this point), and somehow escapes the prostate quickly into the bloodstream to form distant metastases. That one is a really hard to catch in time, because there's almost no warning or build-up. I suspect it's overrepresented here in the forum, because we're the ones who are young enough to be online a lot (not that we exclusively own computer ability; my mother in her mid 80s is very Internet savvy, too), and we're lifers, so we keep coming back month after month, year after year. The people with 3+4 or 4+3 that's quickly resolved probably don't hang around more than a few months.