Side Effects ("Morbidity") Half Way Through

Ok, for the squeamish (sp?) of you, this is a time to skip this particular post. No, no, no, it's not so bad but I'm going to get into a side effect that I have been having at the half-way point. I'll space down so you don't have to look


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For those brave souls, the side effect (I know I got all of you to look!), is minimal. First the medical description..... the urethra is the tube that passes from the bladder to the outside of the body --- for men and women. It's like a flexible straw or tube. For men, it passes right smack dab through the middle of the prostate and then goes through the penis. Some men get BPH ("benign prostatic hyperlasia") - a fancy way of saying that the straw gets compressed by the prostate squeezing on it. When that happens, instead of the McDonalds milk shake straw size that allows the pee to flow freely through it, it gets reduced to that coffee stirrer size straw which is much smaller and hence doesn't allow so much pee to get through. Other things can cause that as guys get older, like infections ("prostatis") and other such stuff.

When my prostate started to get bombarded with protons, my prostate didn't like it so much. Like a lot of people, when it got bombarded, it got irritated. Fancy that. And when it gets irritated, it gets all red and puffy (they tell me). And when that happens, it starts to compress on the urethra and make it smaller. So, the side effect is that it gets a bit harder to pee. It takes a little longer. Sometimes it feels like more needs to come out but it won't. That's it. No burning sensation. No pain. Just different. My doc tells me to take Advil to reduce the inflammation. I'm kind of doing that when I remember to -- more to ward off what might get worse than anything. And, he tells me that the inflammation should go away 2 weeks after the treatment stops. We'll see. I'll let you know. The good part is...now I know something is happening. Before I felt anything, I wasn't sure that this treatment was doing anything at all. Now I do. Phew!