Work is insanely busy for me right now, so this will be a shorter post than usual. (“Thank you!” you say.)

I’m coming to the end of the six months since my last PSA test (and the first six-month test frequency in many years), so it’s almost time for my next visit to Dracula. I’m looking at my calendar and I’m thinking that I’ll go somewhere around 7 or 8 October, but anticipation may have me try to squeeze it in a little earlier. Perhaps even the tail end of September. Either way, I have an appointment with the urologist on 22 October to review the results.

I’m not even going to try and predict where the next marker on the chart will land. My spreadsheet failed me wonderfully last time out. As I recall, it predicted a value of around 0.14, and I came in at 0.10. One result at a time…

As a refresher here’s my PSA chart:

Last week, I stumbled across a comment in a Facebook prostate cancer support group that talked about rising PSA, and the author recommended reading/viewing Dr. Charles “Snuffy” Smith’s article, “When Recurrent PCa isn’t Cancer.” Dr. Smith is the editor-in-chief of the website, Prostapedia.

The video was published four years ago, but Dr. Smith seemed to reinforce the notion that my continued surveillance of my PSA without taking other action may not be as crazy an idea as many may think it is (including myself, on occasion). Of course, I’m sure there are plenty of others out there who would argue otherwise, too.

Even though there are a thousand opinions out there, we patients sometimes forget that we really can control our treatment path, as long as we do it in a well-researched and well-thought out way, assessing the risks and rewards. I get to decide what to do in the end. It’s my body and my life, after all.

Stay tuned.

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