One Man's Brave Prostate Cancer Battle
- John Wall, 51, from Ireland is using his prostate cancer battle as a way to educate others about the warning signs and symptoms, and the treatments available.
- He told the country's national morning show, Ireland AM, his prostate cancer is terminal, but treatments have extended his life expectancy.
- Prostate cancer is a cancer in a man’s small walnut-sized prostate gland that produces seminal fluid.
- Treatment of late-stage prostate cancer, also called metastatic or stage 4 prostate cancer, varies depending on the patient's current health status and how aggressive the cancer is at diagnosis.
John Wall, 51, of Clare, Ireland, told the country's national morning show, Ireland AM, his prostate cancer came out of the blue.
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"Just over five years ago, I went to the [general practitioner] with an innocuous enough pain in my leg or so I thought," Wall recalled. "I ended up being diagnosed with advanced metastatic stage 4 prostate cancer, incurable.” The father-of-three was just 46 at the time."Needless to say it was a bit of a shock, it's not something that I had been expecting, but it happened," he said.
Wall explained to hosts Muireann O'Connell and Tommy Bowe that his symptoms began with frequent urination during the night.
"In my case, it would have been frequency urinating," he said. "I was getting up a lot at night and I associated it with middle age. It wasn't."
He says his PSA was "super elevated," and revealed doctors initially believed he had prostatitis, an inflammation of the prostate.
Related: Could A Urine Test Be The Future of Prostate Cancer Screening? Leading Experts Weigh In
"But because I was the age I was, it was assumed it was prostatitis, inflammation of the prostate," he said.
Wall was given a "barrage" of different treatments, including chemotherapy, surgery abroad and radiotherapy in Ireland.
But it was his original ‘prostate specific antigen’ or PSA test, that measures the body’s production of a protein that’s produced in the prostate, that led to his diagnosis and treatment.
Elevated levels can indicate several issues with the prostate, cancer being the most extreme.
"I've been very fortunate that the treatment has worked for me. It has allowed me to sit here today."
But Wall says his cancer is terminal.
A few months after his initial treatment he returned to the doctor because he knew something was wrong.
His PSA was elevated even more, but it wasn't until his third visit to the doctors that he received a diagnosis.
"There was red flags all over the place. That evening, in the space of about four or five hours, I went from the GP surgery to the Galway Clinic,” he explained.
"Once there was one scan taken in the clinic, they knew straight away there was something seriously wrong."
Wall described the feeling of realizing he would have to tell his three children about his cancer diagnosis as "numb in the extreme" because it meant having to face his mortality.
"I remember at the time wondering, 'how are we going to tell our children?' How do you tell your kids something like this," he recalled. "But kids are remarkably resilient and we got through it together."
Wall is now pleading with people across Ireland to listen to their bodies.
He says something "innocuous" could be an early warning of something much worse.
Treating Late-Stage Prostate Cancer
Prostate cancer is a cancer in a man’s small walnut-sized prostate gland that produces seminal fluid.
Treatment of late-stage prostate cancer, also called metastatic or stage 4 prostate cancer, varies depending on the patient's current health status and how aggressive the cancer is at diagnosis.
But new treatment advancements are making more options available and giving patients hope.
Dr. Jeff Tosoian, a urologic oncologist at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, previously told SurvivorNet that there are two primary situations in which a person may be diagnosed with late-stage prostate cancer.
First, there are those who have been treated for local prostate cancer and it recurs and spreads to other areas, "or there are folks who never knew they had a localized prostate cancer and present with cancer, both in the prostate and in other places in the body."
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Screening for Prostate Cancer
This year, approximately 248,530 men in the U.S. will be diagnosed with prostate cancer, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS). Most diagnoses are the result of the PSA test, which is how Tyler’s prostate cancer was found.
Related: 'It's an Honor': Prostate Cancer Survivor Elton John, 74, Featured in New '1971' Documentary All About 'Creative Bursts'
Stanford Medicine’s Dr. James Brooks, a urologic oncologist, says in an earlier interview that men should begin screening for the disease at 55. “Current guidelines are to start screening at age 55 and continue screening through age 70,” he says.
“The reason for that is prostate cancer diagnosed after age 70 has a reasonably low probability it’s going to take your life because prostate cancer, even in its aggressive forms, when it’s localized is a relatively slow-growing cancer,” says Dr. Brooks. “Men who are at high risk because of family history should have PSA testing earlier,” he adds.
According to the American Cancer Society, men with elevated risk should begin screening at age 45. This includes African Americans and men who have a first-degree relative (father or brother) diagnosed with prostate cancer at an early age (younger than age 65).
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