Just getting back on the site after about a month. My excuse for my absence is like others... I lost my dad on May 3. At 91, he had plenty of good years and was probably more ready than the rest of us.
He complained of pain (more than normal) in March and April. My mom had a lot of tests lined up. But when he collapsed in his bathroom on April 22 they found his pelvis had a fracture that had been there for a while... and they found lots of lesions, which had weakened the bone. They accelerated the tests and found his skeleton riddled with metastases. Turned out to be advanced metastatic prostate cancer, which is what I was diagnosed with 10 years ago.
How, you ask, did my dad's rapidly rising PSA (7.7 in 2023 to 288, a few days before he died) go undetected?? Apparently his urologist decided it was ok to stop testing his PSA in 2023. By the time his cancer was discovered from the scans, he was dead before the biopsy results came back.
The moral of the story is: GUYS, get your PSA checked regularly and DON'T let a doctor talk you out of it. They are cheap. There is no good reason to not track PSA.
My cancer was not caught early because of a recommendation by the US Preventable Services Task Force ruling in 2012 advising against routine PSA screening for all men. The USPSTF significantly changed its prostate cancer screening guidelines in May 2018. Too late for me and many other men across this country. The harm is incalculable. Still, I've been fortunate to manage it for nearly 10 years with the amazing medical care at a Cancer Center of Excellence.