<Reminder snipped>

What great news!  I am very happy for you.  I didn't think there was anyone
else of my age and with much the same PSA reports and treatments here in
this group.  I will be 76 in another month and was diagnosed with PCa when I
was 71. My initial PSA was a smidgen higher than yours but the Gleason score
was the same.  Surgery was followed by Lupron (x2) and finally by radiation,
then with undetectable PSA readings for nearly four years.  Needless to say,
both my oncologist-surgeon and I are quite pleased.

May goodness and mercy follow you for the rest of your life.

Ken Bland

Great news Stavros!  I hope the PSA never comes up again.

My own PSA has bounced around a lot for two years after
radiation, but at the two year mark, it reached a new low value
and I'm hoping it stays there.

Your confession proves beyond a doubt that you are a normal human
being.

I think that fear of death is something that we conquer one day
at a time.  When I am afraid I go over all the reasons in my mind
why I shouldn't be afraid to die.  It is a natural end of life.
It is something we all know from childhood on.  If I allow the
fear of death to keep me from enjoying life - then I'm dying now,
before it is time.  And after I'm dead all the great things that
I've known will continue to exist: great music will continue to
be played, the people I love will continue to live, the progress
of knowledge and of the human spirit will continue to develop,
the wonderful parts of our lives are just as wonderful for having
existed whether we live on or not.  The task we are given to
live our lives with some grace and some optimism is really not
beyond our capability.

I tell myself all those things and I really do feel better.  I
really can face the future with more courage and equanimity.

But I have learned that, in spite of all that, there's no
guarantee I won't wake up the next morning, or in the middle of
the next night, with a renewed sense of dread.

It happens.  Despair overtakes us from time to time.  We're only
human after all.  So we have to renew our courage and our insight
each day.

Judging from your postings to this group, I think you've done a
pretty good job of that.

   Alan

That's great, Stravros!

The cure for low energy level is expending more energy.
i.e., Unless there's some other health thing that precludes exercise, the
best path to greater energy both short term (the next day) and long term
(the rest of your life) is heavy exercise, including play, the gym, or
ditchdigging. You have up to three things that sap one's energy: cancer, low
T, and radation. Exercise should improve your vigor with any of those, but
none of them will allow a LOT of exercise. Balancing rest and exercise is
probably a challenging project. (You can be checked for lingering low T, of
course).

Eating to fight our existing cancer probably matters most to your psyche,
since essentally none of these foods or supplements has been PROVEN to help.
Some have never been tested, some failed their tests, some had neutral
outcomes, maybe one or two showed enough promise to warrant further testing.
One can 1) ignore supplementation because it's unproven, 2) live on
supplements and special foods in case they help, or 3) anything in between.
The only answer I feel fairly strongly about is to do what you want, because
nobody knows for sure (except about some that failed pretty solid tests. No,
I don't recall which those may be.) whether any of it helps.

1. That seems short-sighted. If something tastes good, is not suspected of
harming us, isn't expensive, and isn't ridiculed by the medical community,
what the heck?

2. The guy whose pages of 16-hours-a-day of weighing and grinding and
blending and staggering and timing (to the minute with some concoctions) an
incredible list of chemicals and jungle growths has chosen to abandon LIFE
in the hopes he may add a week or 30 years -- of weighing and grinding and
blending and staggering and timing -- to his time on the planet. I hope he
finds time to catch a movie somewhere in there. OTOH ... he is solving his
psychological problem, and maybe that's his top priority.

3. I LIKE marinara sauce, so I put various versions of spaghetti sauce on
some of my food; it's good on amost anything. I also like stewed tomatoes,
so there's more lycopene. And curry and cinnamon good, too, so I put those
on my food when appropriate.  Whether the heavy salt in the tomato items
hurts us more than the lycopene helps -- if it does -- I don't know. Beyond
that, I have a life to live, and have better things to do with my precious
time than devote much of it to grasping at straws. Hell, if a mainstream PC
tx  like *A*D*T*  adds only months to our lives, what should we really
expect from crapola off the internet?

If the foods you want are sat fats, heavy odds say you're just adding a
significant threat to your longevity and vigor if you succumb to them. In
the slim chance that I may hold my cancers at bay for another decade,
there's no way I'm compromising my health just for some friggin' bacon. In
fact, I'm eating even healthier now (healthier desserts, primarily) and
recently began something I've never done before: busting my a.s at the gym
for 2-4 hours three days a week. I'm going to go down feeling like a
30-something athlete, not live the rest of my life feeling 60-something. (I
can out-athlete the majority of 20-somethings right now, including most of
the weekend warriors I play among all summer.)

I don't even WANT many of the foods I gave up 20 years ago ... but I must
admit that I will dive right back into some of them the minute Harvard,
Stanford, the Mayo Clinic, Michael Jacobsen, and most of the other 100 top
medical sources agree that  Atkins was right (or when I'm suffering with
advanced cancer). So far not one of them does. I would be PISSED if I went
back on that crap and died of a heart attack, cancer-free, a decade from
now. My wife and I eat like (smart) KINGS on very low sat- and trans-fat
foods; I don't NEED no steenkin' lard.

I.P.