UPDATE - Issue 39 - Winter 2010
Patient stories: BPH
In the autumn issue of Update we asked you to tell us about BPH. Dave Griffiths from Cardigan shares his story.
I was born in 1944 and my first intimation that something was wrong was when I was 17 and had such pain in my lower regions I had to push my bike home as it was too uncomfortable to ride. As a student, after long rail journeys to college, I would get a pain after urinating. I found that if I drank lots of water, after a while it would go.
When I got to about 30, my wife suggested I see the doctor, who told me I had non-specific urethritis (NSU)and said I should drink four-plus pints of fluid a day, which I started to do. I still had a pain occasionally.
Then one day in 1999, I had a pain, drank lots of water but the pain failed to go away. I saw my GP, who sent me for a PSA test and gave me some antibiotics. I then was sent to a consultant, via my private health scheme. I had an exploratory operation which ended as a transurethral resection of the prostate (TURP) operation including a biopsy. I went through all the usual stages of wandering round with the red bag and then having to have the catheter out.
I was greatly relieved to find that the biopsy showed no cancer and agreed to a PSA test every six months. It took quite a few months before I could sit for any length of time without my prostate aching, but I just put up with it
.It took quite a few months before I could sit for any length of time without my prostate aching
The following year, 2000, I had to have another TURP operation as not enough had been taken out the previous time. The biopsy was, again, normal. Again it took a long time before the pain in my prostate on sitting finally disappeared. I was also put on finasteride to try to slow the prostate’s regrowth and also on Viagra, as I was starting to find it difficult to maintain an erection.
Some seven years later, in 2007, my PSA had risen to 4. I had had PSA tests every six months for the last seven years and had seen the consultant once a year for a chat and a digital rectal examination. This time the consultant, a different one from the one I had usually seen, explained that, because of taking finasteride, my PSA was really 8 and that I needed another TURP operation which I had that same year.
A year later I saw another consultant who told me, although I was having a fair amount of blood and clots in my urine, that I would probably not need another operation for 20 years.
However, this year, 2009, I saw yet another consultant, who said that I needed an investigation to see whether the blood was coming from the prostate, the kidneys or the bladder or was a result of cancer.
Accordingly, I had a kidney scan and a 10 sample biopsy, the results of which were both OK. A magic eye probe up the urethral tube proved inconclusive since it was not possible to go up to the prostate and bladder since a ring of scar tissue had formed in the urethral tube as a result of the previous operation. As things are at the moment, I shall be going to hospital again in 2010 to have the ring of scar tissue cut and a proper magic eye examination of my prostate and bladder.
So, it’s an ongoing saga really and I just hope that my prostate will slow its growth as I get older. The operations were not that unpleasant and I quite liked seeing what was going on on TV but I still don’t like seeing blood in my urine, even though I’ve been told it’s no more that having a nose bleed.