Just Another Diagnostic Thursday
I have to say I have had a few instances in the last couple weeks of losing some of my patience at being a person experiencing prostate cancer. I would go so far as to say I found myself at times in a state of profound irritation at the whole business.
I scheduled an ambitious set of procedures for Diagnostic Thursday last week. I was grateful @mary offered to drive me.
I had an MRI of my neck, an EMG (electromyograph) nerve conduction study of my left arm and leg, and a blood draw. The news is not bad, verging on good.
My MRI showed that I still have cancer clumps on my bones, including my cervical vertebrae, but that they’re not getting bigger, and they’re not invading my tender and vulnerable nerve channels.
An EMG measures the speed at which an electrical stimulation of a nerve causes a muscle contraction. It’s kind of like the myoclonic jerks you sometimes experience when you’re falling asleep, but a whole lot more of them in quick succession and it hurts. The good news is that while there’s some damage from chemo, it’s not too severe. The best thing was my technician, who’s been doing EMGs since 1977, worked for one of the neurologists who taught Oliver Sacks (my favorite neurologist) back in England.
My blood tests revealed that my key scary number, PSA, is still increasing, but it’s not increasing any faster than it has been since April, when it first started going up — just before chemo number three (of six). It’s now 12.9 — considerably less than the maximum before treatment of 25.9. On the other hand, it’s a lot more than the .03 or so that a lot of people on my Metastatic Prostate Cancer Facebook group are reporting. There’s also alkaline phosphatase, a number that rises when there’s damage being done to bones, and it’s currently the lowest it’s been since my diagnosis, and is in the normal range for the first time since this all began. So that’s encouraging.
We’re having a meeting with my Westmed oncologist tomorrow morning, and I’m pretty sure he’s going to suggest I start on Xtandi, a hormone treatment that seems to be pretty powerful at getting PSA numbers down, but also has some side-effects I hope won’t happen to me. We were thinking of holding off on starting Xtandi until our initial consultation with Memorial Sloan Kettering, but insurance hasn’t yet agreed to pay for it. We asked about paying out of pocket and were told the cash price for an initial consultation is $2,750, which seems like a number from an alternate universe.
So the adventure continues. Thanks to everyone who’s following along and sending thoughts and prayers and positive energy mojo.
