Interview 34

Age at interview: 72

Age at diagnosis: 67

Brief Outline: Diagnosed with prostate cancer 1995, TURP in 1984, hormone treatment.

Background:

Highlights foreign statistics indicating the benefits of screening.

There have been examples of screening which has proved highly successful in the Austrian Tyrol for example, the screening for over 60,000 men was offered free on a 5 year period. As a result of this, deaths from prostate cancer fell by 43% whereas in other cantons of Austria where this screening was not offered death rate remained exactly the same. So this was a pretty convincing indication of the value of screening which included both PSA and DRE tests.

America is much more advanced than this country which is very evident from the death rates from prostate cancer, the 5 year survival rate in this country is about 42%, in America it's between 85% and 90%, and this is very largely due to far more people being screened for prostate cancer by PSA and DRE and it being caught at an early stage where it is still treatable.

Describes how the TURP operation cured his symptoms for a number of years.

He suggested I go into the local infirmary to have TURP operation, that's a trans urethral resection of the prostate. That really means putting a catheter up the penis as far as the prostate gland and then cutting away some of the gland to reduce the restriction on the urethra from the enlarged prostate. This was a fairly straight forward operation, it's under general anaesthetic, but the surgeon then scrapes away part of the prostate. You're completely unaware of what's happening, when you come to in the recover room there's no real pain, and, but you're kept in hospital for about a week drinking loads of water and passing the water through a catheter into a container until all the debris from the operation is washed away and any blood is washed away. 

Unfortunately in my case, and probably about in 3 of the 9 in the ward there was a bit of infection and so I was kept in for a further 3 days. But after that the operation proved to be completely successful, passing urine was perfectly normal and that, the power was back there and it seemed to have completely cured the symptoms. I did have a little bit of bother with the urine spraying somewhat for the first year or so really but I did learn afterwards I could have had that corrected at the time if I'd mentioned it. So after that I'd no problems at all until oh, 12, 13 years later.