Biopsy or not to Biopsy

[Guest guest]

I'm scheduled for my first prostate biopsy on Tuesday and I'm afraid to start down the path.

When my PSA started rising a few years ago I started reading about Prostate cancer. There is so much information out there and I know I haven't scratched the surface. I continue to see a lot of conflicting info. Who do you believe? When it comes to conventional treatment options there are life changing side effects with all of them. Those side effects don't just change your life but the life of most everyone close to you as well. There is the financial impact to the family and the negative emotional impact to everyone close to you. I know there are two kinds of stress, one good and one bad. This one is bad and it's not going to make me or anyone else healthier.

I see the biopsy as the first big event in my life as a cancer patient. As Tuesday draws near the stress & fear are building for me and my loved ones. I've watched many others go down this path and cried for them. The biopsy always seems to be followed by a rapid cascade of more exams, more trips, more doctors to meet with, more high stress decisions to make and more treatments. I know that there are a few people who walk this path and go on to live a relatively normal life but it's not a high percentage. We would all like to think that we are tough enough to be in the winning group but the statistics argue that idea.

From the time we were kids we have been taught or conditioned to accept the idea that if we are sick or injured you go to a doctor. Only the doctor knows how to make you well and you take the medicine no matter how bad it tastes. I think that for most things our faith in doctors and medicine is absolutely justified but I'm not so sure about cancer. Doctors have been looking for the answer to cancer for a heck of a long time and the cancer treatment statistics don't show that they have found it. Their basic tools are still cut, burn & poison. It seems to me that the focus is still to treat the symptoms and not the cause.

Today my instincts are screaming that there should be a big sign on the path I am about to take that says "Danger, Bridge Out Ahead". In the final analysis I always try to trust my instincts. I believe that instinct is a basic survival mechanism we are all created with. My instincts are telling me to look for another path and the big question in my mind today is: would a biopsy lab analysis be of any value to me if I take another path?

Dave