Last week I was part of a panel sharing personal experience of prostate cancer.
The video of the webinar has not been shared yet, but in my contribution I gave three pieces of advice:
1) Take care of your mental health. Cancer Is tough on your physical and your mental health.
2) If you can work on prehabilitation before treatment – do it! My experience has been that I felt it certainly helped me and my recovery from treatment.1
3) Get ready to advocate for yourself, research from reputable sources and do not wait for information to be provided to you.
Most of all I want everyone to encourage men and trans women over 50 (over 40 with a family history or men of African descent) to get their PSA2 checked regularly. My cancer was found without symptoms.
I have had surgery and currently have an undetectable PSA and made a rapid and “remarkable” (according to my surgeon) recovery.
- Added this note after my talk – but backs up my point https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/prehab-review-surgical-results-1.7438652 ↩︎
- Prostate Specific Antigen ↩︎
@matthewguy Thanks for sharing this – it needs to be said. Did you experience the PCPEP program? Saw a presentation about it recently & they have some great outcomes! https://pcpep.org/team/
Team
@sflkirk I did! I spoke about it in the webinar. Fantastic program. I was 5 months in when I had surgery. I credit it for a lot of my lack of side effects (together with my age, weight and cardio health). I am now one of the “mentors” in the program too.
@matthewguy It takes a lot of courage to share these intensely personal experiences. Thanks for doing so ❤️
@sflkirk I do not enjoy talking so personally about myself – give me another subject and I love it. It is one reason I stuck to practical tips. Other participants spoke from the heart about their experience – that is not really me. I do want to share my experience as although having cancer REALLY sucked, I have come out of the experience relatively unscathed compared to many and I want people to understand there is a range of experience. Rob and Gabriella from PC-PEP are inspirational too.