In 2013, Paul's PSA level began to rise. He began to feel unwell too with weakness, nausea, vomiting and lack of appetite. He lost a lot of weight in a very short period of time.
In the spring of 2014, CT and bone scan revealed that the cancer had spread to bones and lymph nodes. Looking back on it now, I cannot understand why the scans were performed as late as spring of 2014; I mean, the PSA had been going up and up for months at this point. This is why I encourage everyone who has cancer and everyone who cares for somebody with cancer today: make sure that scans are performed on a regular basis, ask for them to be performed, be persistent, don't let them tell you that they will leave it for another while and simply observe the situation. In fact, I think scans in any type of advanced cancer should be performed every six months regardless of the treatment plan or medication the person is getting.
So when we got the results from the scans, Chemotherapy was suggested for the very first time. Both of us vehemently rejected the idea. I still remember us sitting in the doctor's office and me saying, "What? You want to give Chemotherapy to a man who is 65 years old?! Is he not suffering enough already?!" I had absolutely no idea. Back then, I felt Chemotherapy was a "bad treatment" that only worked in thirty percent of all cases anyway and that it was too aggressive and too harmful... I just didn't know anything about it. My words to the doctor that day were just uninformed talk repeating what I had heard people say who were just as uninformed as I was. Little did I know how many people and at what age and in what condition are receiving Chemotherapy and that often, when Chemo is the only option left, you go for it because you are afraid of dying at that point. So, since Chemo wasn't an option for us, we were introduced to a doctor who had just introduced a new drug into Ireland. Paul was one of the first patients receiving it in this country as far as I know.
Within a very short period of taking Zytiga in combination with the other hormone treatment Paul had been receiving for the past number of years, the cancer seemed to be under control again. The PSA had gone back down from first 150 to 50 and then further from 50 to 0.2. And Paul was feeling a lot better, nausea and vomiting had stopped, he was able to eat again and he was slowly putting on weight as well.
We were so happy and grateful.We felt so so very lucky. I remember saying, "This is wonderful! You can live like this for many, many more years! And when Zytiga starts to fail, I am sure there will be another drug on the market that we can try."
We were told that, in most cases, you get two or three years out of the treatment with Zytiga. We didn't allow our thoughts to go there. We wanted to be happy and relieved and enjoy the chance of more time together that we had been given by this doctor who had agreed to prescribe Zytiga for Paul.
In 2014, we got engaged and in 2015 we got married. We bought our own home in April of 2016. We were so thrilled that finnaly everything seemed to come together for us: Paul's health was under control, we were happily married, we had a beautiful home of our own... I remember this period between 2014 and early 2017 as the happiest in our life.
The knowledge that it was likely that we wouldn't have too much time left together didn't frighten us at the time but it actually made us more determined than ever to make every day, every hour and every minute very special. I think in 2015 and 2016, Paul and I realised that the most important thing was to create as many happy memories as possible together. Of course we, like every other couple, had occasional arguments and conflicts but we always recovered from them fast because we didn't want to waste any time arguing and experiencing distance from one another.
The knowledge of impermanence of life - knowing that, eventually, we will lose everything we love including our own life - had an empowering effect on the two of us. We just knew we had to make the most of our time together in this life. And I really and truly think we did.
