56 yo male - I say die to the hypothetical. Family history says I’ll face that choice in the next 15-20 years, my answer might be different then.
I’m already livin the dream right now. I could live to be 200 and never need it again. I may want it sometimes, but I want a cigarette and a Xanax too sometimes. It’s just not worth the effort to deal with the surrounding bullshit.
Wow, wow, wow. Be good to yourself. You’re figuring out what that means after a divorce. Framing things in such extreme ways can put so much stress on what are already hard decisions regarding your care. First things first - be good to yourself.
WordMan, thanks much for your concern. I’m not contemplating anything extreme. And, yes, I’m doing exactly what you said, but I don’t know yet what it means to be good to myself in my new circumstances. I’m just contemplating this new twist, and throwing out a “what would <SDMB poster> do?” question, which helps me think about that.
Oh, so you’re married then ?
I guess I would pick life but I would be very cranky. I would have to take up another habit. Like heroin.
An older man goes in for his annual checkup. The doctor says, “You’ve got to masturbate more, sir, if you want to keep your prostate healthy.”
“Uh… how often?” the man asks.
“At least daily,” the doctor says. “In fact, you should do it now. I’ll just step out of the room. When you’re done, get your next appointment date from the receptionist, and then you’re free to go.”
The doctor leaves, and the man sighs and takes care of business. As he’s walking down the hall he sees, through a slightly ajar door, a stunningly beautiful nurse giving an elderly man a blowjob. The doctor walks by a moment later. The man points at the door and asks, “Hey, what gives?”
The doctor glances in, shrugs and says, “Same diagnosis, better HMO.”
Sorry to hear about your non-diagnosis. Not knowing is rough and my only biopsy was bad enough; a second biopsy would be no fun.
FYI - a post-biopsy infection had me in the hospital for 3 nights with a temp of 104+. Got some bad antibiotic advice from a doc filling in for my urologist. Any sign of something unusual (for me, fever, uncontrolled shivering and inability to pee), get to a doc that knows about prostates & biopsies.
They thought you were serious and killed themselves.
Sorry for your worrisome situation, squeegee. I know it’s stressful.
Ugh, sorry to hear about your experience. Apparently a prostate biopsy makes some people seriously ill according to what I’ve read. I felt horrid for about 4 days after with chills and flu-like aches, but I never once ran a temperature so I didn’t call the doc. But I’m also one of those people that doesn’t get a fever almost ever, for any illness, so I think I was fighting infection that didn’t get bad enough to send me to the hospital. But I was sure ready to go if it got worse. I’m not looking forward to facing that again.
Thanks, Teela.
Okay - give yourself a bit of time to process things.
To quote Moneyball, “Are those my only two options?”
In other words…sorry to hear what you’re going through, squeegee.
3 MONTHS of bleeding. That was my result. and the biopsy didn’t find anything anyway. I curse my family genetics My paternal GF and one cousin died from it, my father has it, I have BPH. So my urologist is on the aggressive side of treatment.
Me, I think I’d rather die. I must be a 20 YO stuck in a 59 YO body.
Wow, you have to have gotten what my urologist threw out (he didn’t push it, just made it an option): doing like 30 cores (the ‘normal’ one is 12 cores) of the prostate for the next biopsy (“which will just about take it [the prostate] out,” as he put it) to really nail if I did or didn’t have the big C. My reaction was: ugh – If you have to kill me to decide if I’ll die, no thanks.
Congratulations on coming out the other end of non-diagnosis. It sucks being in the middle.
See another Dr!
T**********are other treatments.
oopsie
Squeegee: 12 cores. the hysterical thing is we both agreed I could still have cancer (none was found) --the needle could have just missed finding it. :smack:
on an earlier non-procedure appt. he got me confused with another patient. I not so gently upbraided him for this considering I was a potential surgery candidate. Think he might have put a red X on my file since then (“difficult patient”)
Um, wow. This is exactly my experience. They did the 12 cores, 11 were fine, 1 was “can’t rule out carcinoma”. So I’m now in limbo.
So: you were in my exact shoes at that point. What did you do, and how did you find out if you did or didn’t have prostate cancer?