Prostate Cancer Update #4: Radiation Therapy, Appetite, and Incontinence

Well, I just completed three weeks of radiation treatments. Let's talk about it.

Urban Christian Veterans provides a safe place for Christian Veterans of color to discuss the challenges you face in your daily lives. Being a person of color has its challenges. Being a Christian has its challenges. Being a Christian has its challenges. Being a veteran has its challenges. All of those factors being combined makes for a unique and sometimes difficult life experience that is seldom talked about in public forums. Thank you for tuning in to the Urban Christian Veterans Podcast. Thank you for tuning in to the Urban Christian Veterans Podcast. Here's your host D'Allen.

Rose. Thank you, erin, for that wonderful introduction. This is D'Allen Rose and you are listening to the Urban Christian Veterans Podcast. So in previous episodes I've talked about how I got here my biopsy, the PET scan and MRI and hormone therapy. Now I'm going to go over the actual radiation treatments themselves. So I've been scheduled to go through these every weekday for five and a half weeks.

The first session. They call it that, but it's really a simulation. For this simulation, it's basically a dry run. They bring you into the room, set you up on the table, let you know how it's going to feel, what it's going to be like, get you used to the machine that you're going to be sitting in or having the treatments done by. So this first session, they treat it as if it's the real thing. So you have to go through the actual prep and they give you instructions on what you need to do.

The instructions for these treatments are that your bladder has to be full and your rectum has to be empty. What that means is you got to drink some water and you got to go through this enema. So they bring you in and they do this scan to look at your bladder and your rectum. And the reason for this is the bladder is like a balloon If it's empty, it's going to lay flat and it will block the radiation from reaching your prostate. Same time, the rectum has to be empty because any wastes will block radiation from reaching your prostate. So I come in the first day and my bladder wasn't full enough. And they tell me it's possibly because I might have been dehydrated. And the way they explained it to me is that if you're dehydrated, what'll happen is your body will absorb the water that you drink and not all of it will make it to your bladder because your body is using it. So I had to make sure that I drank enough water the next day.

I also have to wear loose, fitting clothing, no metal like zippers and buttons or anything like that. So I wear sweatpants and a T-shirt and during this procedure you keep your clothes on, but you pull your pants and your underwear down to your thighs. They hold a small towel over your crotch and have you sit on the table. You swing your legs up onto the table, lay back, with the towel still over your crotch for privacy. Your legs up onto the table, lay back, with the towel still over your crotch for privacy. Your legs go into, like this foam cushion thing with these cutouts for your legs to rest in, to hold your legs in place. Then they put this foam ring around your shoes to hold your feet in place. Then they give you a small foam donut-like thing for you to hold onto with both hands resting on your chest, to keep your hands up and away from the radiation area.

Now this machine it's a dual purpose machine. It does PET scan and radiation and it has these three arms right, the first arm is right above your head, right in front of you when you're laying on the table. That's the radiation arm. And then these two arms on the side, left and right, are scan arms. Those are the PET scan arms. So the ones on the side, they kind of fold out and adjust on either side of you. And the radiation arm, when they start the machine up it'll rotate around. In fact all three will rotate together in a clockwise motion and the radiation arm starts underneath you. So this whole machine it rotates around you clockwise, 360 degrees. Sorry, that's a 180. It actually goes 180 to begin with and that's when it starts. So the technicians leave the room and there's this humming sound that comes from it when it starts up and the PET scan starts. If the scan is okay, then the table makes these minor adjustments to make sure you're in the right position. Lasers line up with marks that they have put on your sides Well, I should say hips and your stomach. They put these marks on you and then these little lasers come out and you can see the green light and they line up with your marks to make sure you're in the exact same position every day.

So then there's a pause, the scan takes place. If everything is good, the radiation light comes on in the corner of the room by the entrance. I can see it out the corner of my eye. It's like a flashing light Machine starts back up. Then you hear this high pitched buzzing sound as the machine rotates around you clockwise, 360 degrees. So the radiation arm starts under you, it rotates slowly 360 degrees, goes all the way around you and then it ends. When it's back up under you again, it stops, it resets and then it rotates back counterclockwise again, 360 degrees, until the radiation arm is directly under you. Again the buzzing stops, radiation light goes out and the machine arms go back to the start position, meaning the radiation arm comes back around, rotating clockwise until it's above your head again. Well, really, since you're laying down, it's in your face and as that's happening, it rotates slowly and the techs are coming back in and everything you know goes back to the start position. The techs come back in the room table, slides you out, away from the arms and lowers you back down toward the floor. They take the ring from your hands, remove the ring from your shoes, lift your legs up and they pull the foam from up under your legs, swing your feet back around onto the floor, put your pants back up and you're done. Whole process takes between 10 and 15 minutes, not long at all. So you're in and out of there. No big deal.

Now, the first week I had to get used to how long it takes my body to prep, meaning how long it takes between drinking water and my bladder being full. So that was the first week, just me getting used to how long it takes for me to go through this whole drinking the water and how much I need to drink for it to be enough. One week down. Second week it was pretty uneventful, except for the fatigue Started getting tired more than normal. So at the start of each week you have a quick 10 minute chat with your doctor after the treatment your first treatment that Monday. So during that first meeting I told the doc, you know the fatigue was increasing and she said that's to be expected around the second week. So there I am. She said that's normal, okay. So beginning the third week session, same routine.

But the meeting with the doctor was a little disturbing. See, the thing is I hate surprises and this doctor surprised me. So I told the doc that I saw online that my final session had a different description, meaning where all my other sessions there simply said treatment, okay, and the one at the end said simulation. And she says, oh well, that's when we do the ultrasound in preparation for your seed implants, because when this is all said and done, when this is over, the radiation treatments are over, I'm actually going to get seed implants, which I'll talk about later on down the line, anyway.

So I said, oh okay, ultrasound. Well, I had an ultrasound a few weeks ago on my kidneys, so that was cool, no big deal. And she says, nah, that's not how this works. She says this will be similar to your biopsy. All right, let me say that again this will be similar to your biopsy. Now let's put a pin in there for just a second.

Now, if you listen to the episode I did about the biopsy, you know I went into detail about how that went down and how traumatic it was for me. So this was not cool. Like she said, surprise biopsy I thought I was done with that, so it was a surprise. I had no clue that that was coming. So up until this point no one told me that I had to go through that again, and I hate surprises. So my face must've shown it.

And she started, you know, to try and smooth it out. And she said well, you know, this time there's not going to be any needles, but the ultrasound probe has to be inserted as before. That probe, that raggedy probe. I thought I had escaped from that raggedy probe, but I guess not. Anyway, she says on the bright side, you're going to be partially sedated. So I was like partially. Like what does that even mean? She said you're going to be given a volume. So now I'm thinking, man, so I'm not going to be all the way out, I'm going to be drowsy and this is going to be on some old P Diddy type stuff allegedly. Anyway, I left that session a little disappointed, but otherwise the week started pretty routinely.

So let me go into the symptoms. As far as symptoms are concerned fatigue I'm extremely tired, like all the time. You know, it's just like all the time. And, as an example, a few days ago I was preparing my tea. And let me back up. So what I do is my morning routine is that I drink tea in the mornings. My appointment is at 11 o'clock, so at about 9 am I empty my bladder for the last time. I empty my bladder for the last time and then, at about 915, I make myself some tea and I drink that, a cup of tea. After I finish drinking the cup of tea, I have about 20 ounces of water and I drink that. And I try to get that all done by 10 o'clock, so that I'm completely done drinking water one hour before my appointment. So anyway, a few days ago I was preparing my tea before a morning meeting for work and I figured, while the tea was brewing, I'm going to run upstairs, get dressed, so that when my meeting is over I'm already dressed, I'm ready to go. Tea is done, water's done. All I got to do is drive to the joint.

So, anyway, I started the tea and I run up the stairs, got to the bedroom and as soon as I got to the bedroom I got hit with this rush of like dizziness and hunger, like out of nowhere. I just had to sit on the bed with my eyes closed, man, and just let it pass. It's like nothing I could do about it. It wouldn't go away. I'm just waiting, waiting, waiting. Finally it goes away, and like if I didn't, man, I wish I had something in particular to eat. It was like hungry, like I hadn't ate in like three days or something. It was just not a good feeling. And this happened because I exert myself and in fact I also noticed I experienced something similar if I try to exert myself in any way, simple things like lifting things or even like tussling around with my dogs.

See, every now and then I play tug of war with the little one with one of his toys and I had to stop because of the dizziness. I feel kind of bad because he actually brings me the little toy, like it's playtime, like he'll bring me the thing and you know I'll tug on and tussle with him. He gets a kick out of it or whatever. We're like right now. I just can't. And if I do, I got to kind of like sit down and do it from the chair and I can't really get down there like I used to and tussle with him because I just I just get dizzy. I'm tired now, sometimes I forget and I'll just do things that I normally do. Oh oh, time to take the trash out. Okay, well, let me wrap this up and grab this and sling that bag in. Nah, your body will quickly remind you that it is time for you to go sit down somewhere, and that's what happens Like every now and then.

I will reach the bend to pick something up a little too quickly and it just feels bad. A little too quickly, man, it just feels bad. So that's the fatigue thing. Also, there's nausea and loss of appetite. I experience sudden waves of nausea Now. At first it only happened after I ate in the early weeks of all of this, but now it happens randomly, like anytime, anytime during the day. I could just feel like man, something's about to come up and there's nothing. I haven't eaten anything, it's just. I just feel nausea.

Now, sometimes after I eat or even during the meal, I'll feel that way, but mostly just randomly. Throughout the day I'll just feel it like and this isn't good. As far as appetite, now, this is wild because I no longer have a desire to eat anything. But when my body is hungry I feel it, and it's that feeling you get when you haven't eaten in a while. But this is more intense because it comes along with like dizziness and weakness. It's just a bad feeling. It's like I only eat because I know I have to, not because I want to and I don't desire any specific foods, like I eat to make the sick feeling go away. But then there's a cycle and and every meal or every piece of food I eat is like man, I could have did without that, but I had to eat something because I was feeling sick and so me and food have a funny relationship right now. It's like I don't want you but I need you, kind of thing.

Also, in terms of symptoms, I had my first experience with this thing called incontinence. So what's that? Incontinence is the loss of bladder control, and I believe this is one of the things that makes men not want to talk about prostate cancer because it's embarrassing. The loss of bladder control. Now, there's several different types of incontinence. One is stress bladder control. Now there's several different types of incontinence. One is stress. Stress incontinence is where urine actually leaks. When you exert pressure on your bladder by like you can cough, you could sneeze, you can laugh, you can exercise, you can lift something heavy, urine will leak and you can't stop it. That's stress incontinence.

Then there's urge incontinence and that's when you have like this sudden, intense urge to go, followed by involuntary loss. You may go often, including throughout the night, and it might be caused by infection or something else. People who have neurological disorders and diabetes experience this as well. But when you have prostate cancer, you also can experience this urge incontinence. Then there's what they call an overflow incontinence and here it's like you experience frequent or what they call constant for lack of a better term dribbling of urine due to your bladder never really completely emptying, and they call that overflow. It's like some people they'll go, some guys will go and their, their bladder never really gets empty, but they don't, they don't know that it didn't get empty and then when it overflows, it comes out and they can't stop it. Then there's functional. Functional incontinence is basically when someone has like a physical or mental impairment that keeps them from making it to the toilet in time, for example, if you have severe arthritis and you might not be able to unbuckle your pants or zippers and do all that stuff quickly enough, and then you don't make it to the restroom in time, and then some people have a mixture of all of those things.

So me, my first experience was urge. On the third day of the third week, I'm sitting in the waiting area, had done my normal routine and out of nowhere man out of nowhere I had this sudden urge to go. It was like really intense. And what's worse is there's a bathroom near the waiting area, right outside the radiation room. It's a bathroom right there and it was empty. So I'm looking at it, I'm looking at the bathroom and I really got to go Now, naturally under normal circumstances, like, ok, I got to go bathroom, right there, let's go. But I knew I couldn't use it because my bladder needed to be full, so I held it. Now the thing is too, if you ever experience a situation where your bladder is not full enough and you go in there and they do the scan and it's not full enough, they're going to give you two options you can either wait or you can go back home, wait till it gets full enough and we're going to try and squeeze you in between other people's appointments, or you go back home and if you go back home you miss one of your daily treatments. They're just going to tack it on to the end of your treatment schedule.

So, like for me, I completed week three. I was supposed to only do two weeks, but I have to do two and a half, because two more weeks rather. But I have to do two and a half more weeks because one of the days that I came in they were having issues, meaning there was something wrong with the computer network or something, and they were in there, like I was in there waiting 30 minutes and he's like the machines are down. So as the machines were down, other people's appointments were being backed up. So even if it did come back up, I would have still had to wait for these other people's appointments to go before I could have got in there. I was there 30 minutes beyond my time. I was like no, I got to go. I can't sit here and do this, I got to go. So they ended up having to tack that day onto the end of my schedule. So anyway, I'm sitting here.

I got this intense urge to go Bathroom wide open. I'm looking in there, can't even go. Oh man, that was just torture Now. Luckily I only had to wait about five minutes, but it seemed like it took forever and I'm sitting there like man. Man, I gotta to go, I really got to go.

So the radiation tech comes out to me, or she comes to get me. She says you know, it's your turn. I was like look, I got to go. She says, ok, cool, cool, no problem, you're in luck because the side we normally take you to is busy. So we're going to take you to this other side, to this other machine, and it is much faster. I was like look at God, he is always looking out, because on that day I needed a faster machine.

So I'm laying on the table right. We get in there. We go through the whole routine. You know, pull my pants down to my thighs. She got the little towel up over my crotch. I sit on the table, lay the towel over me, boom, boom, boom, feeding the thing whatever donut, you know all of that.

And I'm laying on that table and I am barely able to hold it together. The urge was so strong. I have never in my entire life felt anything like that. Now, thankfully, this machine was much faster and I was able to get out of there quickly. And, man, when I tell you, I barely made it to the bathroom one time. Man, man, but I've never felt like, look, I'm a grown man and all my life I have been able to hold it if I needed to hold it. But this was crazy, like I, I just really felt like helpless, like man. What is going on? I really can't hold this thing. But I made it there on time, did what I had to do.

So the next day I come in and I asked the techs about the day before and I was like what was going on? Was my bladder more full than normal? And they were like no, they said it could have been incontinence starting to kick in, because that's completely normal around the third week. So, man, that's that was wild. So, yeah, so these these symptoms that I'm experiencing again. I'm experiencing fatigue, nausea, loss of appetite and my first experience with this urge incontinence. I really haven't felt that again. Luckily, everything was, has been on time, like I get there, they get me in, they get me out. So I don't know. I just haven't had an episode like that again.

I will say that when I finish every day I go straight to the restroom and I do feel that I couldn't just hold it and then drive and wait till I get home. Now something's going on to where I can't. You know, I really can't guarantee that I can just hold it like I used to, and that's just wild. So I'm just putting that out there. Any guys out there that experienced this listen, don't be ashamed. It is what it is. I mean, you know, as I said, I'm a grown man. Kid used to be able to just hold it down, but for whatever reason, I don't know, it just is what it is.

So that's it. That's it for this session. I think in the next session I'm just going to go through the next two weeks, unless something takes place, I'll just go through the next two weeks two and a half weeks, whatever it is get these over with and go through the, go through the ultrasound with that old raggedy probe, and after that I'll do another update and let everybody know what's going on with that and what to expect. So, as usual, that is it. We're going to go ahead and wrap this session up until next time. Be safe, take care, and we'll talk again soon.