With a CT scan the weight of your prostate can be estimated based on a volume formula. A normal size prostate is about 40 grams which is said to be the size of a walnut.
For a recent CT scan mine is now over 250 grams. When my urologist read the report his reaction was "holy crap!"
If you're not where I am now you probably will be someday so here's some free advice. You'll probably get medication like a combination of finasteride and tamsulosin which taken together can shrink the size of your prostate. At least a little bit. A major joy of an enlarged prostate is that rather being able to pee without restriction and easily empty your bladder you pee a little bit time and time again. This frequency increases substantially at night when you're lying down. Apparently when you're up right it's not as big of a problem.
And then they give you a medication called mirabatriq that is designed to relax the bladder muscle and help the bladder fill with a greater volume. Without insurance that pill you take once a day will cost about $5,000 a year. With Medicare it will cost about $400.
By not being able to completely void your bladder one is more lprone to get urinary tract infections and extreme urgencies to pee that cannot be anticipated by more than maybe half a minute. You walk into the supermarket or wherever in the first thing you look for is the location of the bathrooms.
On July 10th I am going to have an outpatient procedure that the University of Miami hospital where they are going to insert a catheter into my wrist and then that catheter is going to be snaked up past my armpit and down into my prostate wear some "stuff" will be deposited into the arteries leading into my prostate that will cause embolisms that will block the blood flow into parts of my prostate and thus kill about 1/3 of my prostate. This supposedly will happen in a period of 3 to 6 months.
The doctor doing this invented the procedure a couple years ago and has now done 1200 of these procedures. I'll be sedated like I would be for a colonoscopy. The entire procedure should take just a couple of hours.
Many or most of you may someday be dealing with this. I am 67 years old. And this is one of the new found joys of aging for me.
For a recent CT scan mine is now over 250 grams. When my urologist read the report his reaction was "holy crap!"
If you're not where I am now you probably will be someday so here's some free advice. You'll probably get medication like a combination of finasteride and tamsulosin which taken together can shrink the size of your prostate. At least a little bit. A major joy of an enlarged prostate is that rather being able to pee without restriction and easily empty your bladder you pee a little bit time and time again. This frequency increases substantially at night when you're lying down. Apparently when you're up right it's not as big of a problem.
And then they give you a medication called mirabatriq that is designed to relax the bladder muscle and help the bladder fill with a greater volume. Without insurance that pill you take once a day will cost about $5,000 a year. With Medicare it will cost about $400.
By not being able to completely void your bladder one is more lprone to get urinary tract infections and extreme urgencies to pee that cannot be anticipated by more than maybe half a minute. You walk into the supermarket or wherever in the first thing you look for is the location of the bathrooms.
On July 10th I am going to have an outpatient procedure that the University of Miami hospital where they are going to insert a catheter into my wrist and then that catheter is going to be snaked up past my armpit and down into my prostate wear some "stuff" will be deposited into the arteries leading into my prostate that will cause embolisms that will block the blood flow into parts of my prostate and thus kill about 1/3 of my prostate. This supposedly will happen in a period of 3 to 6 months.
The doctor doing this invented the procedure a couple years ago and has now done 1200 of these procedures. I'll be sedated like I would be for a colonoscopy. The entire procedure should take just a couple of hours.
Many or most of you may someday be dealing with this. I am 67 years old. And this is one of the new found joys of aging for me.
