The song ‘Hot In Here’ was off the American rapper Nelly’s 2002 second album Nellyville. It was a #1 hit on the Billboard Hot 100, #4 in the UK and top ten in many other countries. It became his signature song, winning him the Grammy Award for Best Male Rap Solo.  As of today it has also had 172m views on YouTube. It is as catchy and head nodding as it was 20 odd years ago.

What’s the connection? Just sit and relax your little head as we’ll get there in due course.

As I mentioned last time the consultant warned me that the tablets were harsher than the implant. So, as the 30 day timer began to run out I had high hopes that I was going to skip the side effects that I had been worried about. Every time I opened the fridge the white implant box had been innocently staring at me, even throwing me the odd wave for a couple of weeks now.  It was reminding me – no even taunting me even that soon we would become much closer.  When the appointment came to see the consultant, the junior doctor asked me how many I had taken. I said 14 as I had started a little late. I could hear her doing the mental calculation in her head and she said in one of those major operation – this shouldn’t kill you kind of voices – that it should be all right.

I hopped up on the doctors bench and whipped off my top. In my mind she seriously struggled to find any loose fat on my gym toned six pack, but the reality was she only had to give it a quick slap and catch one of the ripples on it’s way up. I didn’t see it properly, but the implant was in a number of parts. Once constructed it was then kind of half inject and half push it in. The pushing part, with a needle that was wider than standard, was uncomfortable for a few seconds but then it was all over and a plaster slapped on it.

About six weeks later I had my first face to face appointment with the consultant. I had had my PSA taken the week before, but I really gave no further thought or expectations to it as I arrived at the station.

Guess who I saw as I got off the train.

Mr Dreads.

He has kinda been on this journey with me from the start, from the first time I approached him and managed to terrify his friend in the process. Turns out this week was his last ever shift for the train company. He said he had taken the job part time many years ago and his face didn’t fit, when it came to any kind of promotion. I reminisced how and when we first met near the start of my journey. I stood and spoke with him for about ten minutes, we hugged fondly and then we parted.

The appointment was not in the normal urology department but in haematology on the ground floor. No idea why the change but hey. I was called in by a doctor that I had never seen before and sat down. She introduced herself and said that she was part of the consultants team blah blah. How have I been? Any side effects? Other than the nightly journeys to the toilet, I had been having no adverse side effects.

Or so I thought.

She wanted more detail.

Well pretty much from the get go, I have been getting up during the night to pee. Not urinary urgency, where you just have to go immediately, but usually more like ‘As I am up, I might as well go’. It was always a full bladder and if it was a good night, it would only be that one time. In the last 3 months or so I can count on both hands the number of nights that I have had uninterrupted sleep. It gets more interesting, however. I could almost set my watch by the timing of being woken up. It was always within 5 minutes or so of 3.15am. It didn’t matter if I had drunk a glass of water minutes before I went to bed or had stopped drinking at 5pm in the early evening.

Then I asked her about the PSA result.

She scanned my record and then said,

“Oh yeah, that has gone down to 0.05”

I paused for a few seconds, trying to comprehend what she had just said.

“You mean 0.05, just 0.02 over undetectable ?” I asked. I just needed it to be said in another way as I didn’t quite believe it.

“Yes, it has come right down” she added.

I sat in a bit of a stupor for a while. I didn’t smile or react in any other way. I had been so conditioned to hearing the worse or at least something not going my way that I just didn’t know how to take it. She spoke about the possible date for the second round of radiotherapy and off I went. It still took a few days for me to realise I should be celebrating and enjoying this rare victory.

And so, I did!

It must have been a week or so later that I was working from home and if you are in the UK you will know that other than a few days we are yet to experience anything resembling a summer. For a while now, especially when working from home, it would be chilly during the day and I would either go to fetch my dressing gown or hoodie to get warm. However, usually by the time I have made a decision on which is closer to hand or very soon afterwards, I would suddenly feel rather warm and either ditch the idea of additional clothing or remove what I have just put on. During the nights it has been a bit more extreme. I would get a warm feeling, shortly followed by sweating. It has got to the point that I now sleep on top of a beach towel. This had been happening for months now.

I was driving in my car one day and the thought finally hit me. I asked my female friend who is going through the menopause how she would describe a hot flush.

“I could be doing absolutely nothing, and it will hit me. It’s like someone has flicked a switch and I just warm up from the inside. Or think of someone just turning on a fan heater in your face. It then rapidly spreads up and downwards, to cover your whole body. It could last a couple of minutes or half an hour and I just have to ride it out and make sure I have a towel or a fan handy.”

I had been getting hot sweats but didn’t realise it. But get this, I have been getting ‘hot sweats’ for years. During the summer months I would frequently get sweaty and during the winter months there would be occasions I could happily sleep without the covers on. How this differed was in the frequency and there were nights when I would wake up just prior to the event and actually feel my pores opening and then being drenched. Thankfully during the day I would just get a bit warm but it’s never led to being drenched in sweat.

Just to mess with my little head some more, I recently met up with some old school friends over breakfast (shout out to A & R). Mr R asked me how my health was and if I was experiencing any side effects. I said everything was going great other than the hot flushes at night. Now, neither of them suffer from prostate cancer yet both described having regular ‘hot flushes’ during the night as well.

So, to all the ladies out there fighting with the big M.

I sympathise with you all. Just don’t take all your clothes off.

Yuk!