September is the designated month for promoting prostate cancer awareness. Well and good. I’m all for it, but it has a bit of a negative ring. Why not put a positive spin on the prostate? Let’s celebrate the little guy. Why not let October be our Prostate Appreciation Month? Doesn’t that sound more cheerful? Here’s why I think it could help. Despite living through many Septembers prior to my prostate cancer diagnosis in 2010, I remained unaware of it. Worse …

When it feels like a matter of life and death, especially our own, we need reliable information to move forward. As we chart our course after a cancer diagnosis, we inevitably confront the issue of trust. In this complex world, we need help. When it comes to discovering, diagnosing, understanding, evaluating, managing, treating, and surviving prostate cancer, we depend on advisors we can trust. But where do we turn? Who do we ask? Who can we trust? Let’s consider this …

For us prostate cancer patients, life changed forever on the day we were diagnosed. Like flipping a cerebral switch, our view of the world was instantly reprioritized from top to bottom. Much of what once mattered little suddenly became paramount, and what may have seemed important often became trivial. We cancer patients know this, but the other people in our lives—our doctors, nurses, friends, and family—might not fully appreciate the intensity of this altered perspective on life. A closer look …

At the end of this post I’ll discuss the important exceptions that make the rule. What rule? We proton patients are a happy bunch—maybe even happier than the rest of the general population. This is a non-scientific personal observation based on more than seven years of being a prostate cancer proton patient. The notion occurred to me after a recent trip to my treatment alma mater, the University of Florida Health Proton Therapy Institute in Jacksonville. I visit UFHPTI several …