The key to one man’s successful bout with prostate cancer was to keep researching and keep asking
In 2001, Dr. James Priest was two years into his life as a retired surgeon when the phone rang.
He picked it up as a busy author working on a fantasy series. He hung up as a 62-year-old man with newly diagnosed prostate cancer.
Here’s the spoiler to the story: Today he’s fine. His cancer is essentially gone, and he’s long since returned to his writing. Yet for a while his life was as dramatic as any novel he could concoct. And his own story’s tagline would be something like: He was the surgeon who refused surgery.
The anxiety that occupied Priest’s mind upon his diagnosis will surely hit the 192,000 men who the American Cancer Society estimates will be diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2009.
There remain three primary ways to treat prostate cancer: surgery to have the prostate removed; radiation involving placing radioactive “seeds” in the prostate gland; and external beam radiation.
Priest’s urologist recommended surgery. So did his family doctor and others he consulted. Yet Priest, an orthopedic surgeon for more than 21 years, was uneasy with surgery’s possible side effects as well as the possibility of human error.
From the night he was diagnosed, he became a relentless researcher — phones, Internet and office visits.
“You want to do the right thing for yourself and your family, because you don’t want to die at age 62,” he says. “Yet you don’t want to go through something you don’t have to and possibly develop complications that you don’t have to develop.”
Priest ultimately chose three-dimensional conformal radiation therapy, known as 3D-CRT. Relatively new with no long-term study results yet available today, the process uses computers to map the location of the prostate. From there, radiation beams are shaped accordingly and aimed at the prostate from several directions.
“I basically didn’t want any procedure done if I could help it,” Priest says. “That’s why external beam radiation sounded best to me, because I didn’t have to have any invasion — any human doing anything inside my body.”
Priest kept a journal throughout his ordeal, which resulted in a book, “Beating Prostate Cancer Without Surgery,” published in 2005 by Fairview Press (with a forward by prostate cancer patient Archbishop Desmond Tutu).
Once the decision was made, Priest embarked on a long series of sessions that have resulted in good test results and no impotence or incontinence. Today his mind is off cancer and back into his fantasy series, “Kirins.”
“People who are diagnosed should get more than one medical opinion from more than one specialty such as urology, radiation oncology, medical oncology and your family physician,” Priest says. “I’m not adamant about everybody having external beam radiation, that’s for sure. You can get a good result with any of those three major treatments.”
Joe Tougas has written for The Blueroad Reader, Minnesota State University Today and Static magazine.
