Doubts

It has been a week since I had the terrible reaction to the hormone injection and I am pleased to say that so far, there has been no recurrence.

The clinical trials team have been in touch with me this week, twice. The first time was to inform me of the result of the bone scan. The result was good. No cancer in my bones and no reason why I should not take part in the trial. I just had to wait to be “randomised” by the computer to find out which “arm” of the trial I would be in. There were four possibilities with varied treatment.

The second call from the trials team was to tell me that I had now been randomised and the computer had decided that I would go into the group which was receiving the basic treatment. I have to say I was disappointed. I had hoped that I would be in a group which would get at least the treatment that I would have chosen for myself. There was no point in trying to hide my disappointment from the researcher and I was still reeling from the episode following the hormone injection previously.

I told the researcher that I was having doubts. Not necessarily with the clinical trials but that I was unsure whether I wished to have any treatment at all. My mind keeps coming back to the question of quality of life and it is giving me a hard time in trying to work out which will be the best way to go. For me. It is difficult to reconcile that, before last Xmas, I was “living the dream”, feeling fit and comfortably running up to 5km. Following the tests, diagnosis and commencement of treatment, my dream is now a nightmare and I probably could not run a 100m.

When I signed up for the clinical trials, I was not being altruistic. Quite the opposite. I am a very selfish person and I would have been hoping to get some benefit from taking part. That is likely to not be the case now so if I do decide to have treatment, I will probably fall back on the choices offered to me when I was diagnosed. I don’t have to decide yet. Not for another month at least.

Unusually, I am stuck for something funny to put in this post so I am going to add a little verse that I put in a facebook conversation recently. I need humour!

So it's true, no longer a rumour.
I have got a prostate tumour.
But I'm not one for quitting
And hormones permitting,
I won't lose my sense of humour.

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