Unfortunately, especially for anyone looking to these posts to catch up on my situation, I kind of abandoned this blog for the past couple months. It wasn't intentional but I got depressed and also so tired of talking about everything that was wrong with me. I still kept a handwritten journal with daily entries, though, so I'll attempt to catch up with entries that I made there.
My last blog entry was from mid-October and I was somewhere around the middle of a month's worth of fairly intense (double dose) radiation treatments. I wrote about being tired a lot, but also that the days were punctuated by random days with more energy. As the treatments progressed past what I had written here, the fatigue got worse, as did the internal side-effects of the radiation. The better-energy days still occurred, but less often. My (paper) journal contains a lot of entries about being "wiped out" as well as how basic bodily functions were becoming much more difficult.
After my last blog entry, my wife started driving me to the treatments, just to take something off my plate. It was a simple gesture but so very much appreciated. One aspect of the radiation therapy that I didn't expect to grow to despise was how I needed to hyper-hydrate myself before each daily treatment. No exaggeration here: I had to drink about 40 ounces of water and not get rid of it during the two hours prior to a treatment. There were times when I was literally lying on the table inside the tube, feeling like I was going to burst. I never had any accidents but I did have a couple close calls. The trouble was not only how much water I was ingesting but also how all the swelling "down there" was making me feel like I had to "go" even when I wasn't actively hydrating.
In my (paper) journal I wrote about how, "bodily functions have become increasingly difficult, uncomfortable, and immediate." I won't go into any more detail but suffice it to say that October was a very uncomfortable month. My last radiation treatment was on October 22 but all those uncomfortable side-effects stayed with me for several weeks to a month later. (I was quite relieved to be done with the hyper-hydrating, though.)
At the end of the month, I had some bloodwork done and met with my oncologist about the results. My PSA had slowed from its pattern of tripling every time we checked it but it hadn't gone down from the level that prompted the radiation treatments in the first place. My oncologist suspected that it might be a reaction to the radiation that he called "tumor flare" and asked me to have labs done again in a month to see how the PSA might have changed. Due to the Thanksgiving holiday and subsequent scheduling issues, I wasn't able get in again for bloodwork until December 2 and we met with my oncologist on December 4. My PSA was 3.27 at the end of October and continued to rise to 3.54 when we checked again in early December. The rise wasn't alarming but it was still a rise and could not be left untreated.
The oncologist mentioned several possible issues, including a mutation of the original cancer that wasn't generating PSA as rapidly. Since he was just hypothesizing he insisted that, before I left that day, I have some labwork done that was different and more specialized than our usual. He also put in a request for a different kind of PET scan than I had previously. My insurance company denied that at first (it's a very expensive scan) which freaked me out. Thankfully, my oncologist appealed the denial and it eventually went through.
