Running with Crohn’s: It’s a Guy Thing I

This entry doesn’t discuss running at all.  Instead, I’m going to talk about the prostate.  If you don’t care to know about the details of male plumbing, then you should stop reading here.

Warning: this entry contains graphics that some might find objectionable.

The prostate:

The prostate gland is a doughnut shaped organ that surrounds the urethra (as illustrated in the graphic below).

Like women’s breasts and ovaries, men’s prostate glands are more prone to developing cancers than many other organs.  Urologists use a blood test for “Prostate Specific Antigen” (hereafter-called “PSA”) to determine whether men possess a higher or lower risk of developing prostate cancer.  In general, doctors consider high PSA numbers bad.  However, for many men, they look more closely at how the PSA numbers change over time rather than the absolute number (increasing numbers are bad).

PSA Test

PSA levels in men tend to increase as men age.  Therefore, younger men often possess low or undetectable quantities of PSA.  Doctors used to use 4 ng/mL to differentiate between men with low chance of having prostate cancer and men with a high chance of having it.  More recent studies indicate that the direction of change and the “velocity of change” in this number are stronger indicators of cancer risk than the absolute number.

And me

In early 2012, I developed a kidney stone.  In March my urologist surgically removed that kidney stone (a topic for another entry J ).  I went back to the urologist in August for a follow-up appointment.  In that appointment, I mentioned to my doctor that my family had a history of prostate cancer (in my maternal grandfather).  Because of that indicator, my doctor advised me to get a PSA test, which I did.  My PSA test indicated a 2.15 PSA.  Not a high reading for someone in their sixties, however, my urologist felt that it was high for a fit 47 year-old.  He advised me to get my PSA taken with a differential.  I did this and got a similar PSA reading.  Therefore, my urologist recommended a prostate biopsy.

I declined because I had begun to exhibit some signs that I had a fistula and I had read that infections in and around the prostate could trigger higher PSA readings.

The doctor agreed that the fistula might cause the elevated reading, so he suggested that I take a 30 day round of antibiotics and then get my PSA retested.  Therefore, I did this and then got my PSA retested.  My third reading (after the antibiotics) was 2.05 (still high for a man in his mid-forties).  At this point, I agreed to get the prostate biopsy (this happened in January of 2013).

I'll discuss the prostate biopsy in my next entry.