January 13th came along all too quickly. The day of the biopsy.
I read the paperwork again. Needed to have a urine sample and of course I had no specimen bottle.
In the morning we had to go into Hythe and so I got a couple of bottles there. Should have asked when we were in the surgery a few days earlier!
So was it as bad as the paperwork said? No in short.
The consultant, Raj, explained that the MRI had been inconclusive. On a scale of one to five where one and two were clear, four and five were cancerous. I was a three.
The description is for a needle between scrotum and anus. This is actually the local anaesthetic injections. Two external and once the probe is inserted, two more inside.
From there it's pretty much a lot of pushing and probing. The probe is about the thickness of my thumb. To get to all parts of the prostate it's moved about. Then the "click" of the cutter that takes a chunk out of the prostate. They took twelve bits for analysis.
The pain lasted about six hours and then dulled to be a persistent ache.
I ended up in the recovery room for longer than anticipated. Blood pressure is supposed to go up as a result of the procedure. Mine was around 136/74 and afterwards it dropped to 115/60.
So they decided to keep me in for a while. If it hadn't gone up they said I'd be admitted to the hospital. Luckily, it went up enough to let me come home. I had to pee as well.
The expectation was that there would be blood in my urine. It was. Quite a few congealed blood clots and then clear.
So now I have a couple of weeks to wait for the results. Fingers crossed.
No comments:
Post a Comment