urology appointment

Early last winter, when John complained about urinary frequency, I was surprised by how willing he was to go to a doctor and do something about it. The diagnosis was benign prostate enlargement, and Flomax didn't help. So the urologist recommended surgery, which John had at the end of February. The surgery wiped him out terribly--it took a week before he was really functional and longer than that for him to not need a catheter. Looking back on it, we were probably seeing a Lewy Body reaction to anesthesia.

The discouraging thing about the whole process was that once the immediate healing from the surgery was over, John wasn't any better off than he had been before. The doctor suggested more surgery but John didn't like that idea at all. So the doctor ordered several further tests and then tried another medication, Proscar, and an office procedure to stretch the area where scarring from the surgery was causing continued problems. The combination worked quite well and John now feels his situation is acceptable. He wants to stay on Proscar because it has stopped his hair loss (a lower dose is approved under another name as a treatment for hair loss).

All the difficulties of the prostate surgery coming right at the same time as John was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease has been a very stressful situation. So it was very nice today to have the urologist tell John to come back in 6 months because his situation is now satisfactory and hopefully stable.

The bad news was a call from John's general practitioner's office asking him to make an appointment to discuss some test results. The two tests were of levels of testosterone and vitamin B12 (the second actually ordered by the neurologist). So another doctor's appointment just when I thought that the amount of time we spend going to doctor's appointments was finally going to decline.