PSA low but rising

I had SBRT (Cyber Knife) about four years ago and after a radiation bounce at 18 mo, it settled down to a nadir of 0.21. A year later it's almost doubled to 037. Here is the data (for some reason I cannot figure out how to insert a graphic where I have it graphed...)

2/19/19 6.3
6/15/19 6.9
7/17/19 7.3
8/1/19 8.7
8/7/19 7.7
6/26/20 6.75
9/16/20 7.9
1/25/21 0.84
8/5/21 0.68
2/9/22 1.1
3/22/22 1.46
6/13/22 1.09
10/3/22 0.66
4/6/23 0.67
10/17/23 0.21
2/21/24 0.4
10/19/24 0.37

So still low and I'm guessing it's pretty much normal but I wanted to see what the community thinks. I'll be seeing the RO next Friday.

Good point. We shall see in 6 or 12 mo.

Thanks Halbert. I hadn't even thought about DT, just a bit worried that this is the first sign that pc has reestablished itself and I'll have to start dealing with it within 10 years of the SBRT treatment.

BTW, do you know how to insert an image? I'd like to pop in the trend graphics as well.

Thanks. I'll check in with the admin on that.

As I try to process this, and I realize right now it's small potatoes, I think about what it really means to be cancer free. When I talk with my wife about it, she tries to keep me positive saying it's still really small, but we all know it's about trends. This may or may not be the start of an upward slope, but it got me to thinking about the notion that cancer always comes back and when I talk about my situation with friends or family I sometimes say that I fully expect pc to return at some point. It may be 5 years or 10 but I suspect I'll have to deal with it again before I die.

When I looked at outcomes before deciding on cyber knife, it seemed that the survival rate was at something like 98% after 5 years and 84% at 10. Sounded really good but I guess what it's not saying is that you won't have a recurrence in those time periods, just that you should still be alive. You may be on treatments of one kind or another that will deal with the cancer and extend your life but the quality of life could diminish. I sure didn't expect to be dealing with a rising PSA after 4 years. Perhaps it's just a low level radiation bounce like the one I had at 18 mo. or just normal noise and will be shown to not be an issue, yet. But I still believe it will return.

Thinking about a recent post I think from a guy who's 79 or so and has decided to forgo further psa tests, it got me to doing the reverse math thinking that if I live until 85 at what point do I just forget about all this? I'm 75 now and if I have say, 10 more years to live I probably don't need to get too excited about what could be anyway.

Does that make sense?

The glass is half full

For sure, thanks.