wow, glad you are not going back, what a rat F**Ker 
hoping there is an especially hot place in hell for people who take advantage like this
I just saw the doctor here in Taiwan. He’s a leading expert and he takes time to answer questions.
The sharp increase and then decrease in the PSA means that it’s likely to be from an inflammation although it’s unusual that I didn’t have any symptoms of an infection. But, I had a stomach flu just before the first PSA so that could have been it. (The Japanese doctor dismissed that but not this guy.)
He believes that we can wait to see if the PSA comes down before doing anything more.
I have an appointment this evening with the doctor from where I lived before and I’ll see if he can work with me moving forward. Maybe see him every six months. I’ll ask.
And I’ll get a new doctor in Japan as well.
What a seesaw. It’s looking very good though at this point
Yeah, not completely over it yet, but I’m feeling so much better at this point.
I’m so glad you have the option of seeing him. Wow, your Japanese doctor sounds horrible.
My husband was also told that his reading was probably from inflammation. (His was about 6, and they think it’s chronic inflammation.) That’s because the MRI didn’t find anything suspicious, i think. He’s supposed to be retested in 3 months. I suspect he’s going to have a bunch more MRIs, but who knows.
My father had his first radiation treatment today with minimal effects. Yeah, I know it’s normally the cumulative exposure that takes it’s toll - but since he’s often treatment adverse, I’m glad it’s starting off with minimal issues!
I’m glad to have read the stories from everyone else in the thread, it helps drop my personal anxiety a great deal, especially when I’m an 11 hour drive away from him. So, again, thanks to everyone suffering the process for sharing in the thread, it’s been a great help.
More roller coaster rides.
The doctor I had in the city I lived suggests that it’s better to be safe than sorry and scheduled an MRI for this Friday. He wasn’t as quick to say infection, and doesn’t like the numbers.
He remembers me and remembered that I moved to Japan and said that since I’m here, let’s do the scan and compare to four years ago.
We did a blood test today so we can see what the PSA has been doing.
The MRI was pretty painless for my husband. And the report sounds like they get a pretty good view of what’s going on inside.
The MRIs were mildly annoying, but nothing bad and no recovery needed. So overall it can’t hurt.
How many treatments is he scheduled for?
I concur. The MRI was the next step for me after the PSA screening. My MRI showed something they didn’t like, and things progressed from there (next step was the biopsy, which further confirmed what was going on). It could show nothing, or something, but why guess or assume? It’s low risk and high reward.
I was not a fan of the biopsy, but it was done in office by the Urologist I won’t be going back to.
It seems my experience was worse than usual.
I almost threw up after my biopsy, it hurt so much. MRI is easy peasy.
I got an MRI for something totally unrelated. They needed to look at my throat area. I went head first into the tube to about my nipples but it felt like I was deep into a cave. Two different sessions for ten minutes each. They told me that if I felt super anxious to let them know. There was a microphone inside somehow and they’d hear me.
It was a 60Hz hum so I knew that if I counted along to 600 I would be done. I fell asleep before I got to 100. I found it super relaxing but I am probably an outlier.
Maybe I am mixing up two different things but I recall that they gave me contrast and that when it went in it would only feel like I peed myself and not to worry.
27 more treatments to go. So, I suspect things will be more wearing further down the line and am trying to be mentally and physically prepared for it.
That will probably be tough.
Yeah, I’m prepped to do the all day drive down to help out as needed with about 24 hours notice.
Damn, I love Taiwan.
I got the National Health Insurance app, and checked out the PSA from Tuesday, and it’s down to 10.886. That’s still higher than 3 1/2 months ago, but the trend looks like it’s headed down.
I’m still happy that I came down and got it looked at here. I’m having the MRI today and I’ll find out next week so I’ll know more then.
I love Taiwan too. I’m sorry that you had that scare.
Sorry to hear that. I had two separate biospies, and for me the worst part was the first one getting procedural sedation for the first time. I’m just a bit of a control freak, so the idea of being made asleep and not knowing what’s going on or what’s being done to my body was a bit trepidatious. It all went well, as did the second one. I was out, woke up an hour later (or at least was conscious and making memories an hour later). I did not experience any pain. MRI was easy, but a little nervewracking at first, as I have had past instances of claustrophobia (like 20-30 years ago), but luckily that didn’t come up again. Everybody says how loud it is, but with the headphones on, it didn’t strike me as too particularly noisy. It was more boring than anything else. If you get it with contrast, there’s a weird icy feeling briefly in your veins as it goes through.
Interesting to hear about some people not getting their test results right away. My stuff always got dropped ASAP into MyChart, before I even had a chance to talk to the doctor, and I cannot say I necessarilyi prefer it this way. When I got my first set of results, I just about freaked out seeing the word “tumor” or “carcinogenic” or something like that in there, without medical knowledge and the ability to fully understand and contextualize the results. Thankfully, I have a friend who is a radiologist who I sheepishly asked to go over the chart after a few days of majorly stressing out who put the results into perspective and talked me back down to reality.
Yeah, my husband learned he had cancer (myeloma) when he had an MRI of his spine that said, “lesion consistent with metastatic disease”. And he didn’t actually hear from a doctor for a week. That was incredibly stressful.