I jumped the gun and got my PSA test done about a week earlier than I planned. I had a  appointment scheduled on Monday to follow-up on my thumb surgery back in February, and I thought I would kill two birds with one stone and get the blood drawn after my appointment.

About 9:00 a.m., the doctor that I had my 1:30 p.m. appointment with called to check in and see how I was doing and if I really needed to come in. “How’s your thumb?” “Still attached and working,” I replied. After a brief discussion in more detail, we mutually agreed that there was no need for me to come into the office.

That kind of put a damper on my getting two birds with one stone, but I decided that I would go to the lab anyway, as I had already planned the afternoon off. It just made sense.

I wish I hadn’t.

My PSA took a considerable jump up to 0.16 ng/ml. I wasn’t expecting that.

The trend function on my spiffy spreadsheet thought it would come in around 0.137 ng/ml so that’s kind of where I had prepared myself to be mentally.

I used the Memorial Sloan Kettering PSA Doubling Time calculator to recalculate my PSA doubling time (it uses values of only 0.10 ng/ml and above), and my PSADT dropped from 155.6 months to 43.1 months. Still a respectable number, but definitely moving in the wrong direction.

Needless to say, this sucks.

My appointment with the urologist is on 22 October and we’ll definitely talk about imaging possibilities and ask for another referral back to a radiation oncologist to discuss salvage radiation therapy.

Crap.

This post originally appeared on Dan’s Journey through Prostate Cancer. It is republished with permission.