Looking Ahead While Waiting for Results

While waiting for the biopsy results I heard from several men who’d already been treated for prostate cancer. One of them had had surgery in Tallahassee. After the surgery, he had years of dealing with bad side effects; he advised me if I had surgery at least to not get it in Tallahassee. Two others had external beam radiation therapy (EBRT) in Tallahassee, with the same radiation oncologist. Both were very happy with the process…with both the oncologist and with his office staff.

Another man had been treated for prostate cancer with proton beam therapy. He had such excellent results—both with getting rid of the cancer and with the lack of side effects--that he strongly recommended I consider proton therapy. He also provided me with a book, You Can Beat Prostate Cancer and You Don’t Need Surgery to Do It, by Robert Marckini. Mr. Marckini also has a website, www.ProtonBob.com. Mr. Marckini provides detailed descriptions about what it’s like to get the proton therapy, day by day. The book was published in 2006 but after reading it I did Google searches on proton beam therapy. I also downloaded a couple of more recently published books. The consensus seems to be that proton beam therapy is at least as good as surgery and external beam radiation at getting rid of the cancer…and it has side effects that are much less problematic than with other treatments. I decided to look into this further.