Health Update- Prostate Cancer Radiation Therapy and Hormone Treatment

we interrupt this regularly scheduled program to bring you an important health update it's Tuesday the 9th of July I'm at my one of my favorite getaway spots Bergdorf Bergdorf Idaho here in the cabins of Bergdorf 750 mile ride to come up here and enjoy the hot springs located right down here so as you know if you've been following this channel for a while about two years ago I was diagnosed with prostate cancer this is the same cancer that killed my dad who got it at about the same age that I got it and he ended up passing away in his early 60s now this was back in the late 80s where treatment was considerably different than today so with that family history I elected for the radical prostatectomy da vinci method laparoscopic done our UC davis and that all went very well and of course both biopsies did indicate cancer kind of a medium medium garden variety of strength so after your prostatectomy it's very important to keep track of your PSA numbers my question to doctors why do you check PSA when you've got no prostate left well you still may have prostate cancer floating around in your system and that's what the PSA check can pick that up especially small amounts after the prostatectomy so sure enough after my prostatectomy initially I showed virtually zero PSA count and then about a year later I indicated zero point two and then about six months after that a year and a half total my PSA was zero point four now those are tiny numbers but it shows a doubling of the PSA count in a six month period so that gets doctors attention and the failure for a prostatectomy is considered at zero point two PSA if your PSA rises above zero point two you got to do something about it so that brings me to today I'm celebrating graduating after a six-week course of targeted prostate radiation therapy here at our local hospital in Nevada City Sierra Nevada Morial Hospital great crew great program so after after being diagnosed with the 0.4 PSA we came up with a plan to do targeted radiation therapy along with hormone therapy this is all fairly common about 20% of these prostatectomies end up with some follow-on treatments like what I'm going through and of these follow on treatments generally 90 plus percent of these treatments works and knocks the cancer down I don't really think you ever cured of cancer you just managed it through your through your life so the radiation treatment lasted six weeks I think it was this prescription was something like 66 millisieverts dosed over a six-week period it's every day five days a week for the six and a half weeks so what's that 5 10 50 20 or 30 30 three treatments total just a zap zap on the table what they do is the doctor get does a a CT scan of your prostate bed area and then creates a topographical map and then goes through and paints by numbers and determines the prescription of how much radiation to give what portion of the prostate bed area of your body each day and each day you get the same amount the same dose the idea being that the radiation knocks down all your living tissues in that area but over the course of the day the the healthy tissues recover and the cancerous tissues do not recover so you just keep beating down beating them down beating them down or right to the edge of causing permanent damage to your good tissues stop the treatments and by then hopefully the cancerous cells are knocked out now the the hormone treatment in this case is lupron by the way virtually zero side effects from the radiation treatment just a little bit of fatigue the larger reactions side effects by far are from the loop loop run hormone treatment Lupron hormone treatment drives your testosterone down to zero the idea is the synergistic effect as they call it of the two treatments together whereas it is believed the testosterone is the fuel for the cancer cells so if you can remove the fuel and then beat them down beat them to death with radiation you can hopefully lick this cancer and again these are all very blunt instruments of modern medicine and this is all going to change in the very near future and then their future this will be done with drugs and in the not-too-distant future genetics just pull out the bad cells and plug in the good cells but there's a whole ethics issue with that but I'm hoping in the future that's going to be the case so side effects from Lupron are the fatigue man is zero testosterone running around with 0 t is tiring you need that afternoon nap but you got to keep moving to and you got to force yourself through the day with that fatigue comes hot flashes irritability [Music] and forgetfulness that's right it's you tend to forget things real easy so ya gotta be careful with the Lupron it starts out with a one month shot and then you get a three month shot and and then it's done so all of this is gonna take a very long time to see where I'm at at the coming out the other end the Lupron drives the PSA count right down to zero so you can't get an accurate PSA count until the Lupron wears off in fact you cannot get a accurate PSA count until the Lupron wears off six months so it's six months after August before I can get an accurate PSA count August is when it'll wear off be done then you can see how you came out with all of this now as far as the FAA is concerned the FAA also uses a PSA count of 0.2 a very tiny number post prostatectomy that considered the failure rate for these failure point for a radical prostatectomy they use that for the definition of a first-class medical so I gotta get so I'm off work for a good long time I'm gonna be on disability and collecting well less than half of what I was earning a huge financial mmm hit plus the medical bills on top of that so you got a young pilots you gotta learn to live within your means you're only six months away from ever mmm coming up until a situation like this it's gonna require you to be off the schedule so you got to have a big emergency fund built up and live within your means so that you can live comfortably within the limits of your disability payments so it'll be ooh boy six seven eight it'll be till February at the earliest before I can get back on the schedule and I have to lobby the FA all of my paperwork to get back approved for a first-class medical we have folks at the airline that will help you get this paperwork through and get that issue resolved so that's the update the health update from Bergdorf Idaho 750 miles up to here brought the big BMW are 11:50 RT starting out just with street riding because I've been off-road riding working on keeping the fatigue levels up but it's hard for me to go off-road riding day after day after day like I used to do so you gotta take it a little easier I'll show you them BMW this big big the big 1150 RTI through an ad on Craigslist for 4,500 bucks not a single phone call so I figured well heck for 4500 bucks I'll go enjoy it for that much so I am Bergdorf Idaho I'll show you around here check it out so the hot springs here at Bergdorf start with two very hot pools right here fresh up out of the ground then pours into the big pool here clear gravel no mining allowed in the pool log sides and then down here there's a neat one of my favorite hillbilly hot tubs with a built in back massager as the water flows out and down into here so I'm gonna jump in here this morning for seeing what's over those mountains that way [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: blancolirio

Views: 123,726

Keywords: prostatecancer, Lupron, Radiation Treatment

Id: pfAycGauOX4

Length: 10min 41sec (641 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 26 2019