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MY PERSONAL BATTLE WITH CANCER... A STORY OF HOPE, PART IV

By Glenn Gramigna

By the next time I kept an appointment at Roswell, everything was getting worse not better. My “hernia” or whatever Mr. Sullivan had thought I had, had turned to undisputed worsening of my prostate cancer and all my tests were going in the wrong direction. Suddenly I was sitting in front of a Roswell doctor whose name I don't remember who was saying things that should have terrified me but which only left me skeptical.

“The cancer you have shouldn't kill you in the next year or year and a half,” he slowly said. “But, after that...” And, then he paused. The clear implication was that this medical prophet was saying I'd be dead in about two years. Of course, the problem with this Roswell doctor's foray into medical prognostication was that he was delivering this less than cheery news in March of 2007 and here I am sharing my medical adventures with you in June of 2012, over five years later!

If I had taken this medical genius' prognostication at all seriously, I might have gone on to fulfill his dark prophesy, possibly in record time. Instead, I kept asking him questions the answers to which made me skeptical as to just how clear the good Doc's crystal ball really was. Actually, I was only just beginning to plumb the depths of his amazing ignorance of the entire subject of prostate cancer treatment.

When I began to ask him about possible solutions to the fairly severe prostate pain I was then feeling, he looked puzzled and said vaguely, “Well, there are painkillers which you can buy at the drug store.”

As I later found out, the doctor Roswell had assigned to me to treat my prostate cancer was completely ignorant of one of the most common and basic prostate cancer treatments that is used all over the world, regular injections of Lupron, which can often relieve prostate pain while curtailing the spread of cancer by lowering testosterone levels in the blood...not to mention casodex, an oral medication which does similar things. I only found out about Lupron two months later when this Doc was on vacation on the day of my regular appointment and another Doctor prescribed it for me! It gave me instant relief from pain and a good quality of life for several months.

However, eventually the positive effects of the Lupron wear off if it is not supplemented by casodex which I wasn't given until April of 2011 when I changed doctors again! If I had been given both right at the start, who knows how much misery I could have avoided!

The lack of being given the right combination of prescriptions meant that I went through a two year period of fairly intense prostate pain with no solutions in sight. I went to nutritionists, homeopaths, and chiropractors, both in the Buffalo area and in Florida, all without any decrease in my pain, but with significant deletions to my bank account.

I learned to enter rooms with only one thought in mind: Find a place to sit down to relieve the discomfort. At night I used naproxen sodium to sleep. This regimen worked pretty well until one early spring morn when an attack of extreme pain had me thinking my end had finally come.

Instead, it led me indirectly to an unexpected rebirth of hope and health which I could never have anticipated during that dark and terrifying morning. As so often has happened during my over six year battle with serious illness, there were better times just around the corner if only I could sustain my hope and strength long enough to reach them.

 

 

Niagara Falls Reporter www.niagarafallsreporter.com June 12 , 2012