I appreciate all the well wishes, support and food over the past 5 weeks. I hope to continue recovery and be back to 100% this year.

My Dr was very conservative in letting me eat real food. I could not have anything normal until last night. So if you gave me food, thank you so so much even if it was not really needed. I sincerely appreciate the thoughtfulness! I will be keeping all the food though. (&it is not your fault that the M&Ms were all white and chalky)

Over exertion now may lead to hernias which I do not want. I will be hanging around home relaxing mostly for a while coming up. I will taper in some work as I get more energy. Feel free to pop in, I have a lot of food to share!

I am out of surgery. Doc says all went well. I will spend the night, hopefully only one.

I have been given 6 oinces of ice chips which is all I can eat until 7pm. This anger me.

This past year, I have changed health insurance to get different doctors as several of my local Dr. friends had thought poorly of my past medical team. I am happy with my current surgeon and have decided to have surgery in September. It will be one overnight at MCR, my least favorite sister will come take care of me.

It is still frustrating that surgeons recommend surgery and radiation docs recommend radiation. I’ve decided that radiation would slow a faster growing cancer for ~15 years and I probably plan on living longer than that.

My doctors say that since I am “so young,” surgery should go well and I will recover quickly, but there are of course no guarantees. When I asked how long I would need care, he said “zero days”’ — I could even drive myself home the next morning. [I do not believe him.]

I will take ~1 week off work and then work from home for a while until my bladder learns to not pee every half hour. Again, due to my “youth,” we hope this is not too long.

What I may need help with:

• Food that I do not need to cook.

• Maybe a few rides around town the first week, but probably not.

• I am not supposed to lift things for several weeks. If it snows before Thanksgiving, I may need help. You should definitely volunteer for this one because you will get full credit for a substantial task and it is quite unlikely you will have to do anything.

Happy hour is tentatively scheduled at my place Friday September 26th. I will show you a bag of my urine.

• There is a 2/3 chance it will never grow enough to impact my life at all

• Without any treatment, 0.5% (5/1000) it kills me within 10 years

• Without any treatment, ~2% (20/1000) it kills me within 15 years (probably lower than my risk of stroke?)

This diagnosis is not a surprise to me.  My dad was diagnosed about 15 years ago, received radiation treatment and is fine now.  I have been getting PSA screening since then which is what detected my cancer.

Doctors have several ways of grading prostate cancer now.  Regardless of the method used, I have the lowest grade.  A non-trivial chunk of doctors argue to not even call it cancer yet.

Even with only a 1/3 chance of the cancer ever progressing, all the doctors recommend treating it with either radiation or surgery as I can tolerate the side effects better at my "young" age.  Docs say to get treatment within 3 years (although that was several months ago now). I will likely get treatment in 2025, but have not decided what to do.  Shockingly, the surgeons say surgery is the only way to go and the radiation oncologists say surgery is for chumps.

This will be the last unsolicited update you get from me on this.  The first 10 subscribers to my new blog get to touch my prostate for free! So read there/subscribe/rss or don't.  I am as shocked as you that this valuable url was still available for me:  www.prostateplay.com It is unlikely that there will be many updates this year.

What I need from you:

• Nothing really

• Beers

• RSVP to events promptly and show up on time

• If it ever goes to shit, send food instead of flowers

• This is not a secret, no issues if you tell anyone else

For math nerds....  while looking for statistics on treatments, google initially took me to the MSK page with their raw linear algebra model.  I was happy to have the nerd skills to use it, but was shocked at this terrible way to present the data to the common man.  Of course, they do actually have a better page .

For internet nerds... Blog is currently on substack.  But it seems quite spammy.  If it is too terrible, let me know and I can move it.

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