On a brighter note.... Breast Cancer Awareness Month

[robgreen]

Hey Rob, I sorry about your mum and wish only the best for her, you and your family. Knowledge is power, but it is also courage, so learn as much as you can and make educated decisions. Don't rely on the doctors to always have the best answers at hand. Case in point was the genetic testing (BRAC stuff) and the estrogen blocker therapy. Both are not in the normal treatment plan, but we knew enough to discuss it in detail with our doctors and it ended up being good decisions.

Thanks a lot Chili, I appreciate that. I work in healthcare,so I've got a bit of knowledge around the subject and plenty of clinical colleagues with a lot more. It's been really helpful bouncing stuff off them over the past few months, but given that I'm in primary care, it's all very much from a primary care perspective. You get to secondary care level and the understanding of those specialist areas and the therapies available is on another plane entirely.

There are secondaries that they're looking to manage, but can't cure. It won't do so forever, but as long as the management is effective, it's about as good an outcome as we could have hoped for I think (the better side of awful as my mate put it). Just need the meds to kick in properly for this slipped disc as suddenly becoming housebound on top of it all has compounded the impact of everything.

Interesting about your friend's prostate cancer. My understanding is that PSA is fairly unreliable as a cancer marker because for the majority of men with raised levels, there's a non-cancerous origin. Certainly over here, you would normally do the PSA in conjunction with the DRE at the initial investigation and then the PSA becomes more useful as an indicator of the effectiveness of treatment after diagnosis.

All the best man