Prostate Cancer - Blood Transfusions

Hi and welcome inner city. I am so sorry that your husband is having to get transfusions. As you can see from my signature, my husband has had similar tx, but has thankfully not needed transfusions. Please visit the caregivers corner. Moonlitnights DH is also getting transfusions.
Again, my sincere regrets for what you are dealing with.
Hang in there and keep posting. There are a lot of new people joining right now, so it may take a little persistence to get responses you're looking for, but there is a huge amount of combined knowledge here.
Beth n Gary

Some of the other members may be able to dig up some posts by one of our esteemed members Zufus. Sadly Bob (Zufus) is no longer with us but he used DES for many years to keep his cancer at bay (had to fight tooth and nail to get it). He had a great deal of information on its use. After all the other hormone therapies had failed, DES kept him rolling along for a long time. If memory serves me rightly possible blood clots could be problematic (controlled carefully by appropriate thinners) and he had a good doc who monitored any side effects closely.

Post Edited (BillyMac) : 11/20/2015 6:30:35 AM (GMT-7)

No the Dr did not mention procrit. But I will, I'll see what he says. My husband's recuperation time from transfusion to transfusion is less and less. Thank you for this.
________________________________________
Surgery 2011/seminal vesicles involved.
chemo failed
radition failed
hormone therepy failed
psa latest 734
weak, fatigue, short of breath

I believe Radium 223 is the radiation via I.V in the arm. My husband had that and it was stopped. It was not helping at all. My huband is seeing a Palliative care Dr. He put him on a med called Remeron. It helps with depression and sleep. He takes it at night. I'm sorry your dad is fighting this terrible disease. I hope he finds peace, comfort and healing all in God's way, in His timing. Than you for sharing.

I can offer empathy but not useful information. My husband had his second transfusion on Tuesday, and was also in the same hemoglobin neighborhood (he was at 6.5 when he had his first transfusion the week before, and 7.1 before this week's transfusion). We didn't see any noticeable benefit from the first one, but this second one I do feel helped his coloring and maybe a slight boost to energy.

Like you, I also wish I knew what to think about this. I'm not really sure what it means that he's needed these (is this just a side effect of his chemo or potentially even the hormone therapy, or his diet -- he has very little appetite, or does it mean the cancer has burrowed into his bone marrow?). I don't know if his doctors will let him continue on chemo if his blood work doesn't bounce back to where it should be.

If I manage to shake some answers out of anyone in the near future, I'll post an update.

By the way, about the Procrit, I asked about it and it sounds like it's an option down the road, if needed, and the doctor seemed pretty favorable to it, said it is a helpful drug, but it also sounds like there are tons of politics. It's a really expensive drug apparently, I think he said it used to be the single biggest drug expense for oncology patients, and then a study came out showing some risk of it actually promoting a certain type of cancer in some limited situations. He said it wasn't a perfect study, and the risk was really really low, but insurers and the government were eager to pounce on it as an excuse to cut the spending on that drug. So he didn't say it directly but my takeaway was that it's not easy to get it covered, that you need to try other solutions first and fail those, something like that.