So is this a forum...a club... a social media site or...whatever you want it to be?

Yes
hERO

logoslidat said...
what ever you want it to be is my choice...just…."don't stand...don't stand so...don't stand so close to me" The Police

gay bar dude...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=islf_eyhmzg

Gear said...
It's first and foremost a medical site ...

Actually, no. It is a community support site where those struggling with a common medical issue can support one another. Members are free to share and discuss medical information they have found but that is not the only purpose of the site, or even the most important one. The primary purpose of the site is to share our experiences and to help other members feel that they are not alone. Prostate cancer is a very isolating disease. The side effects of treatment tend to be things that are embarrassing to talk about and prostate cancer is never a subject that comes up at the water cooler. The forum provides that metaphorical water cooler and, as with all good water cooler discussions there is room here for considerable joshing and off-topic discussion.

"something stronger" in my case would be Capt Morgan while I beat my way through Black Mesa public beta on the weekends.

Peter, good job, as always, you are a wordsmith.

Back in December 2011 when my uro said to me on that dark, rainy afternoon "Well, it looks like you do have a little bit of cancer in there," I thought I'd be a dead man in six months. All I heard was the word cancer. That's how ignorant I was of the beast at that time.

Only later after I had begun reading voraciously about PCa, my new enemy, and then had IMRT for it the following spring, did I realize that as a G6 I was pretty likely going to get past this thing. I realized I could resume living, although my perception of what it meant to go on living, and the value of the time we have left in this world, had been forever altered.

But during all that voracious reading, and research, I found this website. Well, actually I picked it out back in 2012 from among a number of PCa-related sites and chatrooms on which I had been lurking. I chose HWPC because in addition to the invaluable facts it provided, it also offered a vigorous, real-time interaction between posters that I found, and still find, very appealing.

It's common for people to come here, participate for awhile, and then leave, presumably having gotten what they came for. And that's okay. If the site here, and we, have helped them in some way, and they feel it's time for them to move on, then more power to them.

But some of us choose to stay around because of a sentiment often expressed here about "Paying It Forward."

That is, since I myself have had the good fortune of succeeding so far against this thing, I feel it is very fitting for me now, and it's something I want to do, to pay it forward.

I can do this by posting here from time to time either comments on existing threads or starting a thread one of my own, and contributing words or thoughts that, I hope, might prove helpful to someone.

So for me the forum here is a very useful way to say thank you, to Fate, or the universe, or whomever, for my own positive outcome so far, by assisting others if I can.

And that's why I stay.

Thank you.

I had a great reply to this thread(yes I will be the judge of such) on MG's thread my mistake...damm I hate it when that happens...but it thrives in the nether of purple heather that floats on maui's fall...one has seen...shh never tell a tell...be...to thy own spell...a dream...

All tangents allowed...a choir unsung needs little coaxen ...sing as Whitman...river styx...its boatmen...alone bought and sold...fleeing new wine in garments loaned...closets hung....souls undone...

I didn't start hanging out here until after my diagnosis and treatment decisions. My wife had been through breast cancer a few years before and we'd found that so many of those forums were stress-inducing that they were better avoided. We pretty much stuck to medical sites with no user feedback. After I went through RALP I became a more regular reader on this site.

My own lack of anxiety through this adventure is largely due to one of my my running friends, a child psychiatrist. about a year before my own positive diagnosis he had his own. One night on a run he mentioned that he was going out of town for a bit and wouldn't be back to running for a month or two. He told me why and was very matter-of-fact about it, making it pretty clear it wasn't the end of the world and just one of those annoyances that life sends our way as we age. He'd elected for RALP and went out of state, saying that he wanted someone who had done thousands of the procedures. That reverberated for me when I made my own decision to go elsewhere, for me, Cleveland.

I also fight off anxiety with openness and humor and have certainly applied those along the way, sometimes to the chagrin of those around me. I was having a beer at the local brewery with some friends who, as it happens, had their prostates removed sometime ago (we are friends due to other interests, not this) and one of their adult daughters was with us. All the sudden I had a realization and made the proclamation that no one at the table had a prostate. One of the guys was a bit taken aback but we all had a good laugh in the end.