Interview 38

Age at interview: 67

Age at diagnosis: 66

Brief Outline:

Diagnosed with prostate cancer 1999, watchful waiting.

Comments that his symptoms began with an irregular flow when passing water.

I suppose it was 5 years ago or something like that, I was going to the GP about something else but it had just struck me that urinating wasn't quite the same as it had been. I think there was probably some dribbling or something or stopping in the middle and then having to go again, something like that in a mild kind of way. And I mentioned this to the GP and he immediately referred me to a urologist and this was about 5 years ago something like that. And he initiated a battery of tests and about the test concerned, kind of bladder function, peeing and all that and one of them was a PSA of course and at that stage, at the first take my PSA was 6, slightly above the level of 4 which is supposedly normal. He didn't propose to do anything but then I had to go back in 6 months time and have another PSA.
 

Explains how he took one step at a time.

Well we thought mm it's arrived [laughs] it's been sort of coming all this while but now it's actually here and I wasn't driven into panic or anything, I mean although it was malignant, there was some malignancy there it was at the lowest possible level of threat so I thought oh well we'll have to take it a step at a time, see what these next tests reveal. There was always something more to do and one didn't feel that, I didn't feel that I had to take any drastic decisions about jumping this way or jumping that way until these further tests had been done. So I postponed my visit to India.