I was posted to Bangkok with an oil company from 1997 to 2000. In 1998, I was one of the early tourists to go to the Mergui Archipelago in Burma. I picked up Malaria. That is how I found Samitivej.
From then on, because I had such good treatment at that time, we've always come back to Samitivej Hospital and for the last several years we've been doing our routine medical check-ups here.
From these medical check - ups we were aware that my PSA level (An indication of how much your prostate gland is working) was higher than normal at 6 - 7 when it should have been in the 3 - 4 range but had been relatively stable. However, when the results came back this time at 13.8 the doctors said this is something we better check so they took us to see Dr. Isares.
Dr. Isares immediately reviewed the results and recommended we do a biopsy. It went extremely fast, we started the antibiotics on that Tuesday, Thursday they did the biopsy and reviewed the results with us Saturday morning confirming that the left side of the prostate was in fact malignant. He said, " the first thing we need to do is check that it hasn't gone into your lymph nodes or your bones" so that afternoon we did a CT scan confirming it had not spread to my lymph nodes and the next day, Sunday, we did a bone scan confirming the same.
During this time we had already started talking about treatments. He said we have several options, monitor and hope for the best, radiation, surgery, chemotherapy or try a new treatment called HIFU. I said "Okay, the HIFU sounds interesting....."
The thing I liked about it was that there was no radiation; it didn't involve surgery, which can be complicated, and no chemo. So it really just goes in and eliminates the targeted cells and that's it. The evacuation of the targeted cells is through the urinary tract, so it's not invasive. That way you retain your functionality which makes your life much more normal. Treatment and recovery was all within less than 2 weeks. I feel good.
The following Wednesday it started off with an Anesthesiologist. He put me under and the next thing you know, you wake up it's all done and your off to the recovery room. So the procedure itself went fine. In fact it was interesting, I've had small operations before when I've been under and you wake up and you're very drowsy and nauseous but this time i didn't feel any nausea. I was discharged on Saturday.
Often in life things don't work out but this time it just happened that I had to go on business from Nigeria to Singapore and with my wife already in Bangkok we said " We're here now so we better do our medical check-ups at Samitivej" and boom! they found something.
I was so impressed with the way Dr. Isares just took care of it because we're not used to that. We are used to a significantly longer process. At Samitivej we went from PSA results to cancer gone in 2 weeks.
We're really very happy. It worked out well. We're very thankful to Samitivej Hospital that they had this treatment process as otherwise we wouldn't have had this opportunity. I think this treatment is going to take off. It's a non-invasive treatment and you can see that it's going to be a life changer for people.
