Then I went back to see my surgeon and of course he by then had my Gleason score from the biopsy. It was a semi-formal interview, we are on friendly terms anyway and he said, “Well let's look at all these results together” and he said, “Well, the PSA is excellent, 7.2 and the bone scan looks splendid” and he said, “Nothing to worry about in the shoulders we've decided. And the MRI, nothing to be seen, and it seems to be the tumour is actually confined to the gland.” And he and I said, “That's excellent.” And he said, “You're now 67 and you haven't got any relevant history but I'd like you to have a cardiologist's opinion but if that is alright I think we should go ahead.” Now we discussed, a formal talk on you know, radiotherapy versus surgery or even watchful waiting and he said that in his view this would not be a good one for watchful waiting. And then I thought well, we've been through everything but what about the Gleason and I said, “Now what about the Gleason score?” And he smiled and said, “Oh, I wasn't really going to talk about that, don't let's think too much about that” and wrote it on a bit of paper and handed it to me, you see, and it was 8 which as you know, really puts you in a very high risk group. And so I said, “No, perhaps you'd better not talk about that any more but don't let it interfere with what we ought to do.” It would, of course, rule out radiotherapy as the principal form of treatment.
So in his opinion surgery was really the only option?
In my opinion and his opinion. We were absolutely at one about that.
Did you feel that all the options had been well presented to you at that stage?
Yes, I mean I knew the options and we went through them very thoroughly but very quickly. I mean it was not a long interview but everything relevant was said. It was going over very old ground between us because we'd had similar talks about, you know, very many patients between us before.
