Hi,
Some of you may know my journey, after finding out of have stage four prostate cancer in december last year, I started triplet therapy and 3 weeks ago I had my last (6) chemotherapy session.
I just had my oncology appointment and my psa has decreased again to 0.2. This is good news. We are still hoping it will still go down further as the last reading was 0.35.
Its all heading in the right direction.
The oncologist is happy, and assured me that the treatment is working (originally psa 256) and that its now no more chemotherapy, just the regular hormone jabs and daralutamide pills. They are not doing a scan to see if anything has changed, which i have asked for to which they say there is no point if the psa is as low as it is. He said the cancer has most probably shrunk, and is not growing. He said if they did a scan, it would be very hard to find where if any the cancer is apart from the prostate. He said the cancer in the lymph nodes has probably gone.
It sounded positive, so it's a case of bloods once a month until told differently.
Im still not 100% convinced regarding not having the scan completed, so I have asked for a 2nd opinion by my gp to be referred to royal marsden. Maybe im clutching at straws, but i dont like the idea as they say treat not cure due to stage 4.
I will update you all every month but so far all in the right direction, other than my osteoporosis in my back which is giving me gyp lol
Keep fighting for another day
Gareth
Hello Gareth (Tattibogoes)
A very positive post and another success story for triplet therapy which in the long term is a fairly new treatment. Thank you for taking the time to post and I wish you well moving forward with many more lower monthly PSA tests.
It's not normal practice to rescan with such a low PSA (it's done in nearly every other cancer after chemotherapy but not prostate as it looks like the trust in a PSA test is universal).
At 0.2 and decreasing nothing would show on a CT scan and on a PSMA-PET Scan which shows down to 0.2 there's about a 40% chance of finding something and your PSA is going down so by the time a test has been arranged your PSA may well be too low to show up anyway. (Oh perhaps saving £3K on the cost of the test had nothing to do with the refusal to test you!).
I would be very happy with the outcome and you have a great team looking after you.
Best wishes - Brian.
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