The Prostate (dedikált példány) [antikvár]

Preface My husband's father, Tom Worthington, always figured cigarettes would kill him. For years, his family had pestered him to quit smoking. Nobody expected him to die of prostate cancer, not at his age. Even when the diagnosis was made-when it was too late, when the cancer had made its fatal, metastatic leap beyond the wall of the prostate-his doctors were hopeful. "Men can live for years with prostate cancer," they assured him. They set up a course of hormonal therapy, so successful in holding the cancer at bay in older patients. "It's a cancer driven by hormones," his family doctor said. "We'll just shut down the hormones, and the cancer will go away." And it did. For months, serum prostate-specific antigén (PSA) tests detected no trace of the cancer in his blood. During this time, Tom, who had, as he wryly put it, "messed up his life," began fixing it again. He remarried his wife of thirty years, just months after divorcing her, saw the birth of his daughter's baby-his first grandchild-and began going to church. He believed he had been given a second chance at life; he wasn't going to blow it this time. Then the tumor came back, with a vengeance. Within a year of his initial diagnosis, Tom was in a nursing home, castrated, hooked up to a catheter, in agonizing pain, pitifully thin, his bones so riddled with cancer that his arm snapped in two when a nurse tried to move him. Between shallow breaths, as he drifted in and out of consciousness, he told us goodbye. Then he simply stopped breathing. He was 53. The image of Tom's suffering left an indelible imprint on his family. I'm