I got a folder, and I made, and I made three sheets in it for each of the treatments that I was going to consider, and, so I read through what was there and I summarised on the sheet myself, and then underneath I wrote down what was most important for me, coming out of it, so you know, you looked at what the side effects might be, there were suggestions that, you know, in terms of, how long you live, that the prostatectomy, taking the prostate out, was the better option, and you were likely to have, you know, longer survival, if that’s the option that you chose, but to me, quality of life was as important if not more so, in my decision making, than the idea of sort of living to ninety or something, and the, the surgeon who was the first consultant I saw who I liked very much, he also showed me a website, which was a sort of, a sort of decision support thing, which was from an American university, where you could put in your Gleason score and your PSA and it would actually give you information as to what the likely outcomes were for the different treatments that that there might be, and in fact, and, and he thought that that clearly indicated surgery was the best option for me, and I was very happy to look at that because I wanted to take on as much information as I could, but it seemed to me that the differences were actually quite minor you know sort of cancer free survival at five years or at ten years there were, there were maybe five percentage points or something, but it was still, you know, the brachytherapy it was never lower than sort of seventy five or eighty per cent, which to me sounded like quite good odds so, but it was quality of life aspects to me that were most important in making the decision.

And those were?

Sexual health, lack of urinary problems, bowel problems you had to sort of balance these things up cos theyre all subtly different between the… between the different treatments.

When I was making up my mind about which treatment to go for, I actually looked at some qualitative research, sorry because I work as a librarian, you know, I know how to track this stuff down, and I was interested to read peoples experiences, so you had that on some websites, and also you had people who’d carried out research and actually in those papers you can read what people have said verbatim, you know, in their own words, and that was very powerful and quite sort of influential for me.

And then when I saw the consultant for the first time they gave me lots of written material, on alternative treatments, a booklet from Macmillan I think, and one from prostate cancer charity, so I had that, I had a lot to take away, and they, they covered, at that stage they covered all the possible treatments- so they had watchful waiting, a leaflet on watchful waiting as well, which in the end they didn’t think was appropriate for me, and brachytherapy and radiotherapy and, having the prostate removed as well, so I had that stuff given to me at that point, which was all very useful, but when it came to me considering what treatment I wanted, I had to sort of digest that into my own form to be able to sort of help make the decision.