Interview 28

Age at interview: 73

Age at diagnosis: 70

Brief Outline:

Diagnosed with prostate cancer 1997, external beam radiation and hormone treatment.

Explains how he felt tired after radiotherapy.

Did you have any side effects as a result of the radiotherapy?

A little bit of tiredness but that's about all. Apparently it affects people in different ways but all I experienced was a little bit of tiredness. I was still working at that time and my Governor didn't mind me going up there every morning and I was still able to carry on working in the afternoons but it wasn't physical work it was part mental work and part working with your hands because I used to repair fountain pens.
 

Concludes that radiotherapy is a relatively straightforward procedure.

I had to go back the following week where I saw the radiologist and then I had to lie down on a table and she was looking at this, at these scans and she got a small needle and she said 'What I'm going to do,' she said 'I'm going to give you a tattoo which will last you for the rest of your life,' but she said 'it will only be just a tiny little mark.' And she did one on one thigh on the outside of the thigh, one on the other outside and one just above my penis, just right in the middle of the of the pubic hair which I didn't think they would be able to see it anyway [laughs] but apparently they could. And she said 'Right that's all, now' they said 'we've got to arrange for you to come in for radiotherapy,' they said 'it's going to be about 6 weeks, Monday to Friday,' because they don't work on Saturdays and Sundays so they said I'll have a rest from it. So I did the radiotherapy and that, there's absolute nothing to it whatsoever.

Would you like to explain about it?

Yes of course. You go down into this room and there's all these great big machines in the actual radio department and you just sit there and they call out your name and you go into the room and they've got about 3 nurses there and the nurse says 'Right take your trousers partly way down and get up on the trestle type thing,' whatever it is, you'd like to call it, and they said, just pull me trousers down slightly and put a piece of blue cloth over me and said 'Right this only going to take about 3, 2-3 minutes. We can't be in the room,' they said 'we're in the room outside, but we can see you.' And they said 'you'll hear 3 long buzzes and there was this machine that came over me and it was going round from left to right and when it got to where I had the mark on me thigh there was a ping, you couldn't see any laser or anything like that, you couldn't see any rays, just a ping there and then it moved up, down to the centre of me and there was another ping and then one on the other side. And they said it was the physical rays meeting, the three meeting at one point which is where the tumour was, at the side of the prostate.

How did they stop you moving, did they just say 'lie very still,' or

Yes they just said lie still, they didn't, they don't strap you down or anything, you just put your hands down by your side and you just lay there and think of England [laughs].