Okay. I got antsy and went for my PSA test on Friday instead of next week. As expected, my PSA increased from 0.33 ng/mL on 6 December 2023 to 0.37 ng/mL on 19 January 2024.

The silver lining in that cloud is that the rate of increase slowed a bit and it didn’t increase as much as I expected it would.

post-treatment prostate cancer PSA feb 2024

Courtesy of Daniel Zeller

Sometimes, I get too nerdy for my own good. There was a 91% increase between the May and October readings, and there was a 57% increase between the October and December readings, so I averaged the two increases (74%) and projected that this increase would land me at just over 0.5 ng/mL. This increase ended up being just 12% over the previous December reading. Fickle PSA.

I ran the numbers through the Memorial Sloan-Kettering PSA Doubling Time calculator again, using the five values from March 2023 (0.13) on. My PSA doubling time dropped from 6.7 months to 6.2 months, and my PSA velocity increased from 0.2 ng/mL/yr to 0.3 ng/mL/yr since calculating it back in December.

I went for the test early because I really wanted to know the PSA value going into the PSMA PET scan that’s scheduled on 31 January 2024. Plus, if it dropped, I would have had time to ask the urologist if it was worth going ahead with the scan at a lower PSA level. (Remember, I went for a PSMA PET scan when my PSA was 0.22 ng/mL, and it didn’t show anything at that PSA level. Why subject myself to another dose of Gallium-68 if the outcome may not produce any useful information?)

My follow-up with the urologist to review the PSMA PET scan and PSA results is on 13 February, and we’ll map out what’s next from there.

So that’s the latest and greatest. More to come.

This post originally appeared January 21, 2024, on Dan’s Journey Through Prostate Cancer. It is republished with permission.