Prostate Cancer

And you say you get these hot sweats during the day or at night?

Oh they're a real pain the hot sweats, I think I probably aggravate them because I do like hot tea, I like hot drinks and usually they come on soon after I've had a hot drink. But the annoying part is when they come on during the night because whereas I would normally have slept, I'm a great sleeper, I sleep very well, always have, obviously they wake you up and if they wake you up you go into the bathroom, but they are sticky and clammy and they last for about 5 minutes. Now a friend of mine who also has had this treatment he has been taking something called Red Berries which is a sort of herbal treatment and he says it certainly reduces, cancels out these hot flushes. I mentioned it to the specialist and he said well he couldn't see any reason I shouldn't take them if I wanted to. His view was he could give me tablets to reduce the hot flushes but they might have side-effects of upsetting the tummy so I rejected those. But the Red Berries may work but as my blood count has gone up this last year I thought well I'm not going to interfere with anything, I'll just leave it as it is. But no the hot flushes, I suppose I might get half a dozen during the day and a couple at night. Not, they're not serious they're just rather uncomfortable that's all. So they make you very, very wet and sticky for about 5 minutes and then they go off and no problem.
 

But eventually about, this would be about five years after the initial diagnosis, I think, I was put back on eh hormone treatment, but I asked them about the options because I knew from experience that the Zoladex is quite difficult to live with, in some ways, in that it makes you quite tired, so it zaps your energy, and you’re also quite prone to hot flushes which are quite uncomfortable, as my wife knows very well, for other reasons. There was an alternative suggested to me and that was bicalutamide or Casodex, the brand name. I discussed this quite a bit with the registrar at the time, and I was told that the Casodex had the advantage of, perhaps not making me feel so tired, and not giving me the hot flushes in the way that the Zoladex would, but there was a disadvantage that I was quite likely to have gynecomastia, my breasts would grow quite big, and I asked him at that stage, you know, “how big”, and he indicated to me that well it wouldn’t it wouldn’t be too bad, so I was on Casodex for about, about two years, two, I mean I can check all these dates, but I think it was about two years, but during that time my breasts actually did get very big, and to the point where it was really a problem. Now I should say it was offered to me at the time I went on Casodex that I could have had radiotherapy treatment to prevent this happening but on discussing it I opted not to do that, because it was an intervention that I thought, “well this isn’t going to be a life threatening condition so why bother to have some other treatment which is an intervention of a kind”, so I opted not to have it, but of course by the time your breasts grow bigger, it’s too late and you can’t have that treatment, it’s no longer an option. I discussed this with various people and tried different ways of disguising it physically, but in the end I opted to go and have a breast reduction done, I actually thought I was going to have a breast removal done, but I’d been recommended by, yet another consultant, oncology consultant, that the best way of approaching this would be to go and see a plastic surgeon and have it, you know, have the treatment done that way, have the surgery done that way. I did that, I had to pay for it privately, and I actually had to pay in cash although I have medical insurance, they wouldn’t support that, wouldn’t pay for it, even with a, you know we had a long argument about this, even though they will pay for breast reconstruction for women, and this is a very similar situation, they wouldn’t pay for, for this treatment for me, so I paid for that, had it done, just in time for my daughter’s wedding, which was quite good, it made me feel a lot better about standing up in front of people. But to my dismay I found that my breasts grew again quite quickly afterwards, however, at that time, it was also obvious that the Casodex treatment wasn’t working because my PSA score was going up, so I’ve been back on Zoladex now for about four months, and finding things quite hard to be honest (laughs) simply because it makes me very tired, I’ve really got very little energy, and I’ve put on a lot of weight, it’s all in a sort of vicious circle, lack of energy, and the lack of exercise that comes from that then means that my weight has gone up quite a bit, and that makes it worse, so it’s quite hard at the moment, but that’s really where I’ve got to now, that I’m back on Zoladex.