My 85 year old father has been battling prostate cancer for a couple years now. He has gone through radiation and chemo treatments. We have been told the cancer has spread and his PSA is 1600. When he was doing the treatments they also had him on a number of meds from antidepressants to pain pills and many others. He was totally out of his mind and very abusive, wouldn't eat and they sent him home and we have been on Hospice for the last couple of months. Up until all the treatment and drugs, my father was very sharp and just last summer he was mowing his own 6.5 acres of grass. He is now bed ridden cannot support his own weight of 140 lbs. and he is 6' 3". Once we brought him home and stopped all the drugs he got his mind back and he started eating and getting better over all. Three times now he has been back to the hospital and into the same routine of being loaded up with drugs, losing his mind and then coming home. Just last week he started bleeding very bad through his catheter. The clots were so bad they plugged up his catheter and we ended up taking him back to the hospital. My wife has had a lot of bladder infections and this is what it looked like to us. The hospital put him on antibiotics and within hours the bleeding stopped which is how a bladder infection acts. They have kept him in the hospital and put him on pain killers and antidepressants again and they have given him blood transfusions of 4 pints. He has been in no pain at all, but they continue with the pain medications and he goes absolutely crazy. They have done no x rays, but the doctors say the bleeding is the cancer from the prostate.

I have absolutely no symptoms! I am 67 years old and my doctor always ordered an annual PSA. This year it showed up elevated for the first time. A subsequent biopsy revealed a Gleason 9 tumor confined to the prostate gland. I had a bone scan which showed no evidence of spreading, so apparently it was caught early. I was then placed on Lupron injections which dropped my PSA from 6.5 to 0.4. Next week I start on radiation therapy with the very latest equipment which uses photon radiation rather than x-ray and it has an extremely accurate aiming system. I can't remember what the equipment is called, but it is the very latest-and expensive, I'm told. I am a strong supporter of PSA screening because I believe with the aggressiveness of my cancer I would not have had any symptoms until it had already spread.

I am 59 years of age and was diagnosed with prostate cancer in June 2008. Herewith a short summary of what occurred. In September 2008 I had surgery for prostate removal. However, and following further PSA readings, it was evident that the cancer was not contained in the prostate so radiation treatment was followed up in April-June 2009. My readings since radiation have been around .03 which is basically zero. My point in writing this, and after discussing with a lot of men who have had their prostate removed, is to say that I would have never had the prostate removed if I had known that the cancer was outside of the prostate and the side effects that occurred following surgery. For information, everyone that I have talked to that has had their prostate removed through surgery has had to follow up with radiation or some other form of treatment later. It is just not worth the side effects that surgery brings. Just have radiation - it will be enough to stop or reduce the cancer over the long term. The surgeons will not like this advice but they are only interested in undertaking surgery. All the spreadsheets and analysis they provide will lean towards surgery but this is only in their interest. Again for information, I had no side effects with radiation. I know that they say you cannot have surgery after radiation but if radiation treatment is delivered effectively, there will be no need for it. If I had my time again, I would have never had surgery.

My prostate cancer started with great fatigue and slow pain in the lower parts – below waist level. I live in a place which is very hot in the summer and my problems started in the summertime. I could not tolerate a fan switched on with my lower limbs in a blanket. When I returned from surgery (castration), I was comfortable in a cooler with an overhead fan!

I am a 72 year-old male who was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2001. The rising PSA was caught through routine screenings and then the biopsy showed a Gleason of 6. I had 39 treatments of focused beam radiation which held the PSA down for two years then have been on Lupron most of the times since 2003. Surgery was not a good option at the time of diagnosis due to my mechanical mitral valve which requires high doses of Coumadin. Other than energy problems, having to take several medications, and side effects of radiation I feel fortunate to have been able to survive this long since the cancer is still present in my system.