And you say you get these hot sweats during the day or at night?

Oh they’re a real pain the hot sweats, I think I probably aggravate them because I do like hot tea, I like hot drinks and usually they come on soon after I’ve had a hot drink. But the annoying part is when they come on during the night because whereas I would normally have slept, I’m a great sleeper, I sleep very well, always have, obviously they wake you up and if they wake you up you go into the bathroom, but they are sticky and clammy and they last for about 5 minutes. Now a friend of mine who also has had this treatment he has been taking something called Red Berries which is a sort of herbal treatment and he says it certainly reduces, cancels out these hot flushes. I mentioned it to the specialist and he said well he couldn’t see any reason I shouldn’t take them if I wanted to. His view was he could give me tablets to reduce the hot flushes but they might have side-effects of upsetting the tummy so I rejected those. But the Red Berries may work but as my blood count has gone up this last year I thought well I’m not going to interfere with anything, I’ll just leave it as it is. But no the hot flushes, I suppose I might get half a dozen during the day and a couple at night. Not, they’re not serious they’re just rather uncomfortable that’s all. So they make you very, very wet and sticky for about 5 minutes and then they go off and no problem.

The tablets and the injections. I chose that but it means that they’ve got to get rid of your male hormones and replace the male hormones with the female hormones and they’ll tell you if they’re worth their weight in gold these specialists they’re going to give you the female menopause. And you actually go, you have the hot flushes and this is before the treatment. You have the hot flushes you wake up in the night you’re a bath of sweat, your attitude changes, you get very nasty, very irritable, you get on a very short fuse, you’ll take it out on the people you love and you’ll rant and rave at them and you know you’re doing it but unfortunately theres nothing at all that you can do about it, you just let it run its course, it’s not very pleasant. Now I had, after the 4, 4 lots of injections.

Does the Casodex affect you now?

Yes like all hormone therapy [laughs],it’s hot flushes that if you’re emotionally upset or anything like that, if you’re embarrassed you just break out in a sweat and it can happen at any time, anywhere, it doesn’t matter what the temperature you could be in the most, in a freezer and it can still happen. Any man who starts getting this, if hes got a wife who’s gone through the menopause just ask her. My wife turns round and says ‘You’re not getting any sympathy off me, ‘cos when you’re in bed you see you break out in a sweat in bed and you want to throw the bed clothes off and that and I said ‘Oh it’s come again this hot sweats you know,’ she says ‘I know all about it, I’ve been through it,’ she says ‘You never got away from me when I was suffering,’ and well we just laugh about it but it’s uncomfortable and those are the only two things that, is lack of sleep, the insomnia and the hot sweats. But other than that I’ve never had any problems, I mean I’m just coming up to 71 and I’ve just got this new house, I’ve converted a building site to a garden and done a lot of hard work shifting furniture, decorating and all that so I’m not complaining you know, you’ve got to look at it positive.

Right, the Zoladex gives you hot flushes, exactly the same as women have when they’re going through the change. Again, I didn’t have them as bad as some men I’ve spoken to, some men have them really bad, they were sweating nearly the whole time and found it very, very uncomfortable. Waking up in the night absolutely bathed in sweat and having to get up and sometimes go for a cold shower to cool off. Fortunately mine were never that bad. Mine would last may be 3 or 4 minutes where I just absolutely boil up but you know and then I would just sit still and it would go off and I’d be okay again. But there was never any warning as to when that could happen but I found that triggers were often things like having hot drinks or being in a very warm room, things like that would bring the hot flushes on, that was the only problem that I had with Zoladex. When I started having the Stilboestrol, Stilboestrol stopped the hot flushes (laughs) so that was a benefit of having the Stilboestrol but the Stilboestrol caused breast swelling and breast pain, breast tenderness.

And then later on the Zoladex implant, 10.8mgs of Goserelin, and there were side effects there that have grown stronger, the hot flushes for example. Actually these are mostly quite a pleasant experience on a cold day (laughs) to tell you the truth, but one experience where I was sitting at the back of church and listening to a lecture and got through 10 minutes of this very interesting lecture then I really felt like fainting which is unusual for me and so I missed a good 10 minutes of that and what was occupying my mind was who on earth is going to carry me. But that, that was the, I really felt very, very hot, very sweaty and very faint, almost like an attack of malaria, it was rather like that.