Prostate Cancer

At this stage I'm beginning to develop one or two symptoms and the main symptom is that the back passage is bleeding which I understand is quite a normal thing, and passing motions becomes very sore and quite unpleasant and I would imagine perhaps like someone has got very bad piles and the bleeding associated with the piles was very much the experience that I was having. It was important at that stage to keep myself particularly loose because otherwise it was excruciating if I didn't eat lots of fruit, roughage things like that, to make sure that I could pass motions easily. That was one aspect of it. 
 

The only thing is after I finished then we my bowels become irregular.

Your bowels became irregular?

Irregular and like you see very hard pieces, very hard, it was a problem to pass them so I asked my GP here and he gave me medicine. There I told them they said nothing to worry, this happens. And I never realised because I never looked, then after this had finished, after 4 weeks my wife, one day I was changing my clothes, she looked at my abdomen she said 'It's all black what is this?' and I had never realised it, I looked and I said 'Oh what is this?' and then I asked the doctor, he said it is because of the radiotherapy.
 

After the Brachytherapy, although at no time did I suffer any embarrassment I felt that the opportunity to be embarrassed was there. So this, you know I phoned the doctor up because it was extremely uncomfortable and very painful and I've since seen the doctor and this is one of the side-effects that certain people experience. I experienced this pain in the bladder and trouble passing water and passing water far too often to get involved in doing anything else and this obviously leads to a lack of confidence and you don't feel like leaving home. But this has improved dramatically over the last week and it's nearly, I wouldn't say it's nearly back to normal that's probably right but it's on it's way and this is one of the symptoms that you may get. And the doctors aren't worried so far be it for me to be worried because I don't have their experience and I'm sure they're right. And my confidence is gradually returning and I can go out of the house.
 

And what was recovery like?

Well, I mean what I call doctors, one collects every complication going. I had bled during the surgery and after the surgery I was totally incontinent, but only urinary incontinent. But my bowels had been altered but not, I'm glad to say to give rise to incontinence. But I developed the symptoms and signs of a mega-colon, which was trying, particularly if the pelvic floor isn't as strong as it was so you have the combination a mega-colon and poor pelvic floor. So that was a bit of a problem. And one has, of course, a very sore bottom when you wake up from the prostate [operation].

Do you mind explaining to other people what a mega-colon is?

A mega-colon is when one's colon is dilated, when you have a mega-colon, so it becomes almost like a reservoir so instead of being a muscular tube which is going to propel the faeces along, it becomes a collecting tank for faeces. Is that a good description do you think?

In practical matters it becomes '?

Practical matters instead of saying well I want to go to the loo, I must go to the loo, one's bowel seems almost never to be properly emptied. But it can become very over-full and so even without being constipated in terms of having hard faeces or that type of problem, one does have a great faecal mass which has to be expelled from time to time. And there's not much muscle power to do the expulsion because the propulsive, the peristaltic power of the colon has rather diminished.

And the side effects, the bowel problem, how long did that go on for?

Still have it. And so that's 6 years.

So that's a permanent'?

Yes, I was just left with that. And then one was, of course, impotent.