I Want My Prostate Back! (II)

This is the concluding part of the article. Okay, so...just how messed up are prostate patients? That question was answered by a nine-hospital study of 1,201 men, led by Martin Sanda, M.D., director of the prostate-cancer center at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. After 2 years, radiation and brachytherapy patients complained most about urinary and bowel troubles; the 603 prostatectomy patients (93 percent of whom had nerve-sparing surgery) complained more about sexual function.

To be blunt: Sixty-four percent of them said their erections were not firm enough for penetration (compared with 17 percent who had erection trouble before surgery), and just under half did not recover erections suitable for sex. This is, remember, 2 years after their surgery.

"One problem is that doctors often don't spend enough time with their patients to fully explain that sexual recovery typically takes years, not months, and often does not occur," Dr. Sanda says. "Men might assume that as long as they can have a nerve-sparing procedure, their sexuality will be fine. In reality, nerve sparing provides a reasonable chance for erection recovery, but it by no means guarantees it."

I'm not trying to pick a fight with urologic or cancer surgeons, but rather to help prostate-cancer patients have expectations that are more realistic. "Patients live a long time after treatment and many die with, rather than from, prostate cancer," notes Dr. Gore. "It's critical that they participate in shared decision making with their physicians so they don't come out of the process with regret."

I HAD NO REGRETS. AT FIRST. I spent one night in the hospital, and 5 days later I taught a 3-hour class. Soon I'd quit inserting pink panty liners into my boxers. And urination became a reclaimed pleasure: I could piss like a racehorse, just like in my teens.

As for what's clinically called "restoration of sexual function," here's my official report: I dunno. My marriage was a mess, so you can imagine the amount of sexual healing that didn't happen. But plenty of guys' marriages are, you know, meh—just okay. So I wonder: Do a lot of wives think this is a dandy time to close up shop? How many other wives make it a habit to come to bed long after he's asleep?

I also wonder how much of the sexual wreckage is more than just nerve damage. Without any ejaculate, I feel like a broken toy. Like a water pistol that squirts jelly. (Or nothing.) If love ever comes my way again, I'll sort of dread it. I'll be a spectator at my own sexual rehab, and we all know what that does for an erection.

While wondering whether I'd ever again throw the high hard one, I read everything I could about prostate cancer. Within weeks I was filled with remorse. In early August—less than 2 months post-op—the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, the nation's leading independent panel of experts in prevention and primary care, said doctors should no longer screen for prostate cancer in men age 75 and older. At that age, the panel reasoned, the harms from treating the cancer outweigh the benefits.

This was a big deal: As recently as 2002, the panel was neutral on the topic. But the evidence of the last several years led the panel to conclude that the benefits of screening in the 75-and-older age group are "small to none," while the harms from treatment are "moderate to substantial."

As a recent cancer patient, I was totally confused. Wait a minute, I'm thinking. This is cancer we're talking about. If you don't kill it, it kills you. Right?

Wrong.
As it turns out, prostate cancer is "heterogeneous," as the panel's report puts it. That is, one man's prostate cancer differs from another's. Some prostate cancer is aggressive, spreads rapidly, and will kill you. But screening tends to pick up the more slow-growing cancers. They can stop growing. You can live with them for years, symptom-free. Some may even regress on their own, says one theory, without nuclear bullets or robot intervention. I'm not 75, but I still had reason to wonder: Was my cancer the dangerous kind, or the benign kind?

Here's the real problem with screening based on the PSA test: It can't tell the difference! So why operate on a 76-year-old man who is more likely to die of something else? By age 80, most men have some cancer in their prostate. And the question is even harder to answer for younger men.

PSA screening is too good. The panel concluded that in the 75-and-up crowd, screening finds cancer that "will never cause symptoms during the patient's lifetime." Here's a jarring thought: In 1980, a white man's lifetime risk of a prostate-cancer diagnosis was one in 11; today it's one in six. Yet his chance of dying of cancer is lower, not higher. So we're finding more cancer, with fewer fatalities. Just how much cancer is not worth finding? The panel wasn't sure, but noted this: "Incidence data suggest overdiagnosis rates ranging from 29 percent to 44 percent of all prostate-cancer cases detected by PSA screening."

Almost 8 months later, with my toy still broken and my heart breaking, I read the results of two huge trials that assessed regular screening—similar to what I received. They were published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), accompanied by an editorial by Michael J. Barry, M.D., a prostate disease outcomes researcher and the chief of general medicine at Massachusetts General Hospital. His conclusion: "Serial PSA screening has at best a modest effect on prostate-cancer mortality during the first decade of follow-up. This benefit comes at the cost of substantial overdiagnosis and overtreatment."Overdetection. Overdiagnosis. Overtreatment. These are the new buzzwords of 21st century cancer research—not just on prostate cancer, but on breast cancer, too.

Here are the particulars. In one of the NEJM studies, nearly 77,000 men from 10 U.S. study centers were divided into two groups. Either they received an annual PSA test and a digital rectal exam, or they received "usual care," which may or may not have included screening. After 10 years, there was no reduction in the death rate for the screened group.

The other study followed 182,000 men in seven European countries. The 73,000 men who were screened an average of every 4 years for prostate cancer underwent 17,000 biopsies and had a 70 percent higher rate of disease. They also, not surprisingly, received much more treatment. According to estimates, 277 per 10,000 of those men underwent radical prostatectomy (versus 100 in the control group), and another 220 per 10,000 had radiation therapy (versus 123 per 10,000 in the control group). That's a lot of treatment—with few lives saved. The study's conclusion: If you aggressively screened 1,410 men, and cut or irradiated 48 of them, you'd save exactly one man's life.

Were those my odds? I hate those odds.
Did I need surgery or not? Because if I didn't, I want my prostate back.

I'M IN THE HOSPITAL'S PATHOLOGY LAB to visit my prostate, or what remains of it. After my surgery it was sent here, where it was sliced up like proscuitto. Then 24 tissue slices, each just 3 millimeters thick, were stained bubblegum pink and made into microscope-friendly slides. We look at slide F-4 because I want to see what cancer—my cancer, specifically—looks like. It doesn't look like anything. It looks like the Blob.

"It's actually not very interesting," the pathologist is telling me. It's just a ho-hum, garden-variety cancer. If I had left it in my body, she thinks it would have begun to bother me in another 4 or 5 years.

"Probably," she says. She thinks a moment, then tells me: "You made the right choice."

The surgical pathology report on my operation notes that a 57-year-old white male received a robotic prostatectomy. Several specimens were examined, including surrounding fat tissue, vas deferens, and seminal vesicles. All were cancer-free. Finally, the prostate itself arrived: 40 grams. With plenty of cancer to go around. There is tumor present on the left and right sides of the gland, in nine of the 24 sections, and most worrisome of all, it's present at the margin of the prostate on the lower left side.

It's given a Gleason score of 7 (on a 10-point scale), which means it's moderately abnormal. It's staged at T2c, the last stage before cancer begins to spread beyond the prostate gland.

I call someone who will know what it all means: Eric Klein, M.D., chairman of the Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute at the Cleveland Clinic. He thinks I might have gone another decade without symptoms. But based on the grade and volume of the tumor, "I would say, yes, you definitely needed to have that tumor removed."

In another decade, I'll still be in my 60s. My father is 92.

I wonder what my urologist thinks; he knows my prostate better than anyone. After all, he's the man who removed it. So I make my 1-year follow-up appointment. Maybe he's completely changed his position on prostate cancer. Maybe he's prescribing herbal teas these days. Who knows?

My urologist sits down with me and patiently looks over my pathology report. Yes, there was a lot of tumor volume. Furthermore, it was on both sides of the gland. Furthermore, it was at the margin of the gland in one spot. Then he notes a detail I'd neglected to tell Dr. Klein: The cancer was located at the bottom of the gland, a site where, according to a Vanderbilt University study, small margins of cancerous prostate cells commonly remain after surgery.

"By age 70, you would probably have had metastatic disease," he concludes. "Or earlier."

"When would I have begun to feel pain?"
He's silent.
"What are you thinking?"
He's slow to answer. "I'm thinking, dying of prostate cancer is horrible," he finally says. The cancer, once it spreads, causes immense pain. It can obstruct the bladder and everything else down below, so the patient needs to have tubes inserted. Multiple tubes. Requiring multiple hospital stays. And there's the hormone therapy, which is so often in vain.

"If we could know whose cancer is going to progress, and whose won't," he says, "that would be great."

Great for him, I have the feeling, as much as for his patients.

He tries to be helpful. We talk about the odds of recurrence, and PSA doubling time, and various treatments, and what works best. But again, there's nothing you can hang your hat on.

I tilt my head back and scream at his ceiling tiles: "There's nothing about prostate cancer you can hang your hat on!"

Except for this fact: Nobody wants to die of it. So I guess it was a good thing my prostate was taken out.

My friend John is not so sure. Here it is, 18 months later, and he still has erectile problems, leaky bladder problems. Does he regret it? "A lot of times, yes," he says.

As for you? I hope you or your father or one of your friends will not be among the unlucky many to receive a diagnosis of prostate cancer. And this year, there will be enough men to fill nearly three Super-domes. Picture it: row upon row of silent men with full agendas and empty stares. And no place to hang a hat.

See you next week as I write on the prostate cancer treatments controversies in Ghana. Is there a cure for prostate cancer in Ghana using local herbal medicines? Are you also regretting for going through any prostate procedure? Let me know your views as I am currently working on a paper “How did it go? Ghanaian men and Prostate Cancer Treatment” So stay tune!

Dr. Raphael Nyarkotey Obu:ND,MSc, PhD(C). 0500106570

Founder of Men’s Health Foundation Ghana; DE Men’s Clinic & Prostate Research Lab in Dodowa-Akoto House