Chemical Castration and Prostate Cancer:The way it was

The Way it Was
I first heard the words “chemical castration” from my orthopedic surgeon. We were chatting, and he asked after my husband. This was about a year after Dean’s diagnosis (prostate cancer) for which he’d been treated with a combination of Androgen Deprivation Therapy and radioactive seed implantation. ADT is chemical castration. By the time the orthopedist dropped it casually into our conversation, I/we pretty much knew that Dean had, in essence, been castrated. What else is a systematic shut-down of the body’s testosterone?

And yet it shocked me to hear these words.  Why did I have to hear them first from a doctor friend in casual conversation? The urologist who first treated Dean had assured him that eventually his life would come back to normal. He’d been vague about the treatment aftermath, and we should have asked more questions, but we were scared, so we just went along.

By the time my intellect caught up to what my gut already knew, there was no doubt that our lives together had changed. First, there’d been the hot flashes, the lethargy, the passivity of a body learning to live without a hormone that has defined the self. That’s what testosterone does for men, as estrogen, progestin and oxytocin do for women. But we women are prepared all our lives for “the change,” which happens slowly, beginning in peri menopause, and ends a few years later. Men who undergo chemical castration, with the final unkind outcome of erectile dysfunction and low– or no–libido (desire), often know little or nothing about possible consequences going in.

Artificial andropause (my personal definition of ADT) is chemically induced via pills and injections, and effective in only a few months. Because testosterone encourages prostate cancer growth, these treatments are part of the arsenal doctors have assembled to halt PCa or slow it down. Some men receive ADT when their cancer returns; others receive it in late age when radiation or surgery are not viable options. A third less common use, to shrink the prostate in preparation for radioactive seed implantation, was the strategy in Dean’s case; an unwise one, given his age (he was young enough for the best alternative, prostatectomy) and the size of his prostate (90 cc’s, so huge that the ADT actually failed to shrink it sufficiently prior to seed placement). That we didn’t do more research is our regret, one we’ve shared and dealth with via writing and publication (How We Survived Prostate Cancer: What we did and what we should have done, Newmarket Press, 2009).

When we emerged on the other side of treatment, we both had changed, and I was beginning to question whether we had a marriage at all. While ADT went on, not only did we not touch each other, but it seemed that touching of any kind was, for him, repulsive. An insomniac to begin with, he was up all night, those long nights. Between the aftereffects of radiation (burning, surges) and the results of ADT, he was a mess. He wanted to sleep alone, and so my mattress in the attic became my full-fledged apartment. That’s when I began to wonder what the difference between roommates and marriage partners really is. I cried myself to sleep most of those nights.

Many marriages break apart at this juncture; there is research to support the idea that partners of men treated for PCa are often more depressed after treatment than the men themselves. Our marriage didn’t break up. I kept a journal which became the book, a way of talking to the world and to my husband. Dean’s voice entered the narrative and it became ours, part of the new normal we’ve been searching for ever since cancer upended things.

In those long-ago days (8 years ago) hardly anybody was talking about aftereffects of treatment. Support groups and websites existed, but the general narrative was, “Be thankful cancer has been beaten.” Quality of life was on the back burner, because the whole idea of surviving cancer was so new. The effects of treatment, especially hormone blockade, went undiscussed in many doctors’ offices. That’s why “chemical castration” was new to me as a concept a year after my husband had undergone it.

Another reason for this silence is official ambivalence. It must be difficult for urologists to know how profoundly the lives of patient and partner will change, especially if these urologists happen to be men, as most are. Since elemental ideas of manhood–on the street, at the office, wherever–are bound up  in the eyes of society with sexuality and sexual performance (we all know that “potent” has many meanings) the men who receive ADT and the doctors who administer it have, until recently, resorted to a complicit “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Those days are gone, I’m pleased to say, and tomorrow I’ll say why I think that’s true.  Stay tuned.
(read The Way it Is tomorrow).