PCRP Consumer William Spurgeon's "Message of Hope"

The PCRP is a program that I was very surprised even existed. I was delighted to find out that the--the Department of Defense has this program that is directly supporting patients like myself.

I was probably highly genetically predisposed to prostate cancer. My dad was quite old when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, because he was of the class of rugged individuals who didn't like to go to the doctor. He was a World War II Veteran and being the rugged individual he was he said, “Well, Will, at least it wasn’t gonorrhea.”

I remember sitting there at his bedside, basically saying good-bye to him and thinking to myself --no matter what I’ve got to avoid contracting this disease. I’m young. I was about age 48. I’m young; I have time. I watch my weight. I watch my diet. I will get the DREs; I will get PSAs. I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t end up in his shoes. But yet while I was saying good-bye to him, at that time my PSA was already rising. It was probably above 3 at that time.

After I was diagnosed with prostate cancer, it was a rather challenging several weeks for me, trying to understand the impact of this diagnosis and what the options for treatment were. I felt--overwhelmed, saturated, totally directionless with regard to next steps. And then it dawned on me that one of the best ways to get a direction would be to reach out to a support organization like Alta Bates Summit Medical Center’s Markstein Center, and they specialize in dealing with overwhelmed newly diagnosed patients like me. So I walked in the door and an hour later I walked out with three or four good options for treatment and a couple of names of individuals to call who had been in my shoes.

As I progressed through my journey examining the various options and educating myself, the hospital asked me if I would be interested in participating in peer review with this organization, this government sponsored organization called the CDMRP. I didn’t know anything about it. So I just used the same research skills that I had applied to understanding prostate cancer, found out about the CDMRP and the DoD’s involvement with it and I said gosh, this sounds fascinating, because it takes what I already--it took what I already had learned about this disease, the various options of the disease and simply expanded on--would expand on that in doing peer review. And in the process something very important to me, I could help other men.

One of the things that really excites me is to see the passion that the clinicians, the researchers, the bioethicists and the biostatisticians bring to their work and something about being in the review panel rooms and palpably feeling the passion and excitement that they feel in their research gives me increased hope that we really will be able to defeat this disease in the near term.

I’m continuously reminded that there’s another generation of young men who are coming up, and these are the guys that I hope and pray don’t have to worry about prostate cancer as they grow older. And the PCRP is well positioned to help every one of them.

So somebody like my son, he knows that he’s predisposed to this disease. Starting about age 35, it would be great if research could develop a non-invasive test for him to use to check his status with regard to the disease.

My participation, it means to me personally hope and it’s a message of hope that I want to bring back to my constituency of fellow survivors. I run a couple of support groups at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center that is responsible for 250 to 300 men. And any time that they receive a solid message of hope, that is a message that is so gratefully received.

It was this welling of compassion for my sick dad, kind of a frustration that I couldn’t do anything to help him that propelled me to wanting to do more in the support group. Many of the men in my support group are 20 years older than me and are suffering. If I can add value to one of their lives--in a way they’re kind of a surrogate for my father, you see. I can do something good for them that I couldn’t do for my dad and I figure that’s not quite as good as helping my dad, but it’s pretty close.