"Prostate cancer diagnosis"

Having had some extended experience of prostate difficulties, I finally arrived at the stage where anomalies were detected and I had a scan and found the early indications of prostate cancer.

TBH, I felt fine as I had been expecting it. I am both realistic and mildly pessimistic (which I find a useful way to be as you tend to disappointed less, or that's what I imagine), and lucky that it had been picked up early enough for something positive to be done about it. Having said that, how I felt was very much contextualised by my life circumstance, and had this been 20 years ago or 10 years in the future, there is a very good chance that I might have felt far more despondent. So it is important to recognise that how we feel about difficult events is often simply a matter of luck and one's resilience is not necessarily a hallmark of character but often a feature of the circumstances in which a difficulty arises and the nature of the difficulty and what can be done about it. This has a lot to do with agency, and the medical team throughout seem to recognise this, which I see as a mark of taking a patient-centred approach, which I fully support.

I became slightly more apprehensive on reading the side effects of treatment, whilst being fully aware that the side effect of non-treatment was considerably worse. This meant that I had a couple of down days, but for the most part saw the situation as one that needed to be dealt with, and there were plenty of people dealing with worse diagnoses, so I just needed to get on, find out all that I could about the condition and its possible impacts, and decide on how I wanted to go about dealing with it. The clear information and guidance that I received from everyone that I encountered was of inestimable help in all of this. (And BTW, Prostate Cancer UK deserve a shout out in this regard.)

The main point that I would like to make is the care and support that has been offered to me all the way across the board, from the nurses (especially Bindy and Emma) who helped me through the biopsy, the consultant (Ian, I think his name was) who did the biopsy, the specialist nurses (Graham and Jane) who took me through the diagnosis and helped me organise my decision-making, and the consultants from urology (Mr Parsons) and oncology (Mr Srinivasan) who helped me to understand my options and their possible impacts without the slightest hint of being patronising and always speaking to me as an intelligent and capable adult.