Men don’t like talking about their erectile dysfunction. I am making an exception.
Yesterday, I found out from my urologist that my bone scan showed nothing irregular. My prostate cancer has spread outside my prostate, but not far. It is advanced, but not immediately life-threatening.
Had he not caught it in time, things would have gotten much worse.
He caught it in time because of my ED.
I began noticing a problem last February. At age 75, I figured it was statistically commonplace, but only for other guys. Not me.
I made up my mind not to pay retail for any ED pill. I started looking into Canadian pharmacies that sell knock-offs at 10% of the price. I also started looking into non-prescription remedies. I tried some. They did not work.
Then, about two months later, I began having urinary problems. It happened overnight. Iron bladder one night. “I gotta go! Now!” the next day.
That bothered me. Two symptoms. What was going on?
I thought I should see my physician. But my physician is a woman. She replaced my male physician, who retired 18 months ago. I was squeamish about having her do a rectal exam. But then I remembered Ron Paul. He is an obstetrician/gynecologist. His patients, all female, kept coming back. I thought: “If they can deal with this, so can I.”
I told her that I was concerned about cancer. She agreed.
She conducted the exam. “You have an enlarged prostate. It’s one of the largest I have ever encountered.” She had done this before.
She immediately scheduled a PSA blood test for me. I mean immediately. I walked out of her office, and I was in the blood test room five minutes later. The hospital is a 90-second drive from the clinic. It was 4:30 p.m. on a Friday afternoon.
I got into a urologist’s office the following Monday. This was amazingly fast.
There, I learned that I had a PSA of 45. He said: “This is ten times higher than the warning number.” In short, it was high. He then scheduled an MRI.
Next came the biopsy. Cancer was in every sample. Gleason score: 9 out of 10 in every sample. Bad news.
My father had prostate cancer. He beat it. I had not known that it tends to be hereditary. I should have known.
If I had not had ED, I might not have started thinking about medication. That was a warning signal. Then came the urination problem. The two together bothered me enough to schedule my medical exam.
