Or more correctly, my prostate. Last year, it decided to go on strike for a little while. Imagine my displeasure when, last week, the bugger started acting up again. I call the doc, and get an appointment with another one in the office, since my regular doc won’t be able to see me for a while (he stays pretty booked up). On Friday I go and get the ol’ finger shoved up the ass and a script for some antibiotics and leave them a urine sample (this time, I’m not nearly completely closed off) and make an appointment to come back into two weeks.
So, this morning I get home from work and find a message on my phone from the doctor’s office. It’s the “Hi, this is Dr. ________'s office. We need you to give us a call.” message, which means there must have been something fishy about the test results. Fuck. I’m not worried about having to have my prostate cut out (a permanently limp pecker beats no pecker, after all), it’s just that: A.) Even with insurance, I can’t really afford this shit and B.) I have got a ton of shit to do, very little time to do it, and having to run around, get tests, treatment (if needed), and all that crap puts me that much farther behind in everything that I have to do. Fuckity, fuck, fuck!
Sounds scary. I hope this doctor you’re referring to is a urologist, because this is something you don’t really want to trust to a GP or internist. I used to work for a urologist so I know there are many many options before you get to surgery.
What’s your PSA? Do you have an infection? Do you have BPH?
Not to make light of your situation but the thread title caused me to envision a long tentacle-like penis curling around your neck and trying to strangle you in your sleep or trip you when you walk downstairs.
Anyway, I hope everything’s okay with your manly bits.
Wow, Tuckerfan, sorry to hear about your woes. Hopefully the news from the Dr. is not as dire as it sounds. Sometimes, the results come back funky & require more tests. Sometimes, even if you have it in your file that they can leave detailed messages, they don’t.
I will keep my fingers crossed for good news to come to you. Prostates can really be annoying. FWIW, I don’t have any penis, and I do just fine
Best of luck and good wishes coming your way, Tuckerfan. Weird that this should be the first post I read after being away for a while. We just had a health thing happen with Boy Next Door here at our house that had us all sweating. But have faith, modern medicine is quite good and it will all work out. Hang in there.
They always do it; that’s the forum for it. Sometimes the mods even acknowledge, in a sort of apologetic way, the irony of moving someone’s life-changing story to MPSIMS, but it really is the forum for sharing news about one’s life.
Tuckerfan – I know where you live, but I don’t know who your doctor is. Allow me to lighten the mood with a little story about something that happened to me. My doctor is one of the younger ones at SRMC – if you want to PM or email me, I don’t mind sharing who he is, if you need a second opinion – and is a genius. You know what they say about a fine line between genius and insanity, right? It’s true. He is an awesome doctor, but since we are so close in age, and he knows me well enough to know that I research anything that I don’t know…he forgets that I am not a doctor, too sometimes.
I had to have some bloodwork a while back. Routine stuff, but one of the tests came back all kinds of fucked up. As in showing I had final stages cirrhosis or some such fucked up. He called me and asked me to come back in for more tests. When I went in, he was going over the tests and why he wanted to have them re-run and says, “oh, I am sure it’s just some kind of mix up or glitch, but I want to re-run them, just in case. It’s not a major issue right now – it’s just that, well, if the results are correct, it could be a big deal. Well, not really, I mean, the worst it could do is kill you.” :dubious:
Now, I have had this same doctor for like 9 years, so I looked at him, grinned and said “oh, well, if that’s the worst it could do…” :smack: He realised what he had said and to this day, I tease him about it. FTR – it turned out to just be some kind of funky reading. Hopefully, this is your doctor and he just had one of those moments where he forgets that you’re not psychic and know that it’s no big deal. Keep us posted on this, kk?
My grandfather died of prostate cancer and my dad got it in his early 50’s (diagnosed stage 3 - worst is stage 4, so it was bad) but has survived almost 20 years after surgery and runs one of the largest cancer support groups in the country.
Bottom line: early detection and treatment can yield great results. Lack of sexual function can be a complete non-issue. There are some very targeted treatments available and new procedures that take into account important nerves.
Get tested yearly past the age of 40 - both PSA and digital-rectal exam (DRE - and get over your heebee-jeebees). For PSA - what matters is NOT your count, but instead the rate of change in your count over time.
IANAExpert, but you can be my dad nudges me very regularly about developments in this area - in my case, it is just a matter of time…
Well, I called the doc, and apparently, they just wanted to tell me that my test results were “normal.” Naturally, given that I’m a bit of a hammy actor, I’m terribly disappointed with this news.
and you didn’t want to crawl through the phone after the idiot nurse/doctor who didn’t indicate in the message in the FIRST place that it was a
‘don’t panic, it’s not that kind of phone call.’
i had some moron nurse do that to me once regarding my ekg. had i been able to get to her on the second phone call, i would have cheerfully strangled her. i really, really HATE it when they do that… :mad:
Tuckerfan-Maybe it’s just an enlarged prostate and maybe you can start a regimen of meds to control and/or shrink it. Finasteride and Flomax, “as seen on tv” are among the popular ones. The first is also the ingredient in hair-growth topicals and you can find yourself needing a haircut more often. No problems on the palms though. The latter can make you dizzy when standing up and can make you drowzy, and it can decrease the amount of semen that you produce. One, or both, of them can also reduce your libido so you won’t get as horny as often. The latter med is a soft muscle relaxant so if you have a cataract op later, you need to tell the eye surgeon about that as s/he will have to take special efforts to control for that (it makes the iris floppy). Those meds can work for the rest of your lifetime or you can choose to have a reaming out of the enlarged 'state or a thermal “cooking” of it to open the passageway. IANADr, just patient.
:dubious: 