Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
My grandfather have prostate cancer and, you know, I didn't know it by that name
when I was a child growing up, but I knew that every Saturday we would go visit him
as he, over the course of time,
became sicker and sicker.
Only later did I really appreciate what he died of which was metastatic prostate cancer.
Because my father had prostate cancer his kidneys shut down and my father's doctor
basically told us -- sent my father home from the hospital and said, you know,
look, there's really nothing we can do.
Common Ground
My name is Steve Lucido.
I'll be 58 on Thanksgiving.
Lived here in the Vail Valley. Have a wife, Nicole, three beautiful children.
Originally from Baltimore.
We do a lot of paragliding here, kayaking, a little bit of mountain rescue.
Because my father had prostate cancer I've been -- being tested for about ten years.
Just before I was getting ready to go out of the country for several months I had
a test done and it came back at double the normal.
I just needed to get a biopsy as soon as possible and find out what I really had.
It came back with cancer.
It was a Gleason 6. Steve has always been the strong one in
our marriage and in our relationship, so it definitely took my breath away to know
he was gonna be dealing with something that was gonna be challenging his own strength.
I've faced death before in other situations, but never quite like this.
You know, you were always in control,
it was up to you to manage that threat.
There's -- here, there was nothing I could do.
You know, I was totally dependent upon someone else to fix me.
In doing my research I found that Hopkins,
you know, and being from Baltimore, of course, I was familiar with the hospital,
had Doctor Walsh, who had founded this nerve sparing surgery maybe 20 years
before and, you know, of course, you know, saving many men, you know, what's important
to so many men and certainly to myself.
There was one person, one surgeon that kept -- that I kept coming back to,
not only incredible surgeon and I later found out a protégé of Doctor Walsh which made
me feel really good about things. You know, he was also a researcher and to
me that seem like exactly the kind of person you would wanna be dealing with in
a situation like this.
There are several goals when you take care or treat a man with prostate cancer.
The primary goal was to remove all the cancer at the time of the operation.
But there are two other important goals, to reconstruct the lower urinary tract
and reconstruct it in a way that a man will be continent and also to preserve nerve
tissue that enables a man to have *** activity.
Steve sent me a two page email about his particular situation.
We talked about how young he was and that this type of prostate cancer would
threaten his life if he did not seek active treatment for it.
We outlined the treatment plan for him which involved surgery.
We subsequently met in clinic and my feelings on his case did not change,
that is that we would perform surgery and that we would be able to cure him with the
surgical approach along.
At the end of that phone call I was confident that I was gonna be okay.
For the first time I believed that I had somebody that was gonna be able to help me
through this thing.
More men have had radical prostatectomy at Johns Hopkins Hospital than any other
institution in the world.
The first radical prostatectomy for prostate cancer was performed here in 1904.
We all walked on the shoulders of the 18,000 plus men who've had surgery for
this disease at Johns Hopkins.
It's the high volume of the procedures that we do here that allow us to provide
counseling for all of our patients moving forward to say, yes, there was somebody
just like you who had this operation, we did these things for them, and the results
were excellent.
On October 8, 2008, the Lucidos travelled to Johns Hopkins Hospital for prostate surgery.
Steve's operation was an open radical prostatectomy, the type of operation that
Patrick Walsh described 25 years ago,
but it's not the same operation that he performed 25 years ago and over the course
of his career, in my career, we've both made modifications to the technique to
make it better every time we do that.
When Ted told me that he felt really good about it, that he felt like he had gotten
everything and he was confident that I was gonna heal well and be cancer free,
I believed him.
I want to change the future of prostate cancer and that's what I do in my
non-clinical days. I have a laboratory and we are focused on
trying to understand what makes prostate cancer aggressive at a molecular level.
And with that information, begin to develop therapies that are focused on
those specific molecular pathways that make it aggressive.
And so in the next, you know, decade or two, I'd like to take these findings that
we've made in the lab and really bring them to our patients.
And so I'm optimistic that the future of medicine for men with prostate cancer is bright.
You know, I have zero PSA, took a test
just yesterday and should have those new results, so the two year test should have
those results in the next couple of days, and I'm confident because of the work he
did that I'll be zero again.
The outcome was just so much better than what he anticipated that good things have
come out of this and have taken us to different places in our relationship
emotionally as well as physically,
you know, on so many levels.
I appreciate my life on a day to day basis
more than I did prior to the cancer.
And it seems incredible to me that you can go from there to here in such a short
period of time. Seems incredible to be that there's
somebody alive walking around doing a job
that can make that possible.
I, you know, I envy Doctor Schaeffer,
all the doctors at Hopkins, all of the people that do what they do for everybody.
I envy them because I just can't even comprehend what it would be like to be
able to give somebody their life back that way.