PSA: 4,056
My GP suspected colorectal cancer. But prostate cancer runs in my close family, and for years they had encouraged me to get my PSA checked. So I asked for the blood test. My GP didn’t think a 52-year-old with no prostate symptoms needed one. I had to insist. When the results came back, my PSA was 4,056. Normal is under 4. The colorectal consultant looked at the number and whistled. Then he said: “You don’t need me. You need a urologist. Urgently.”
The urologist examined my prostate. Then he said it out loud, just like that: “Oh yes. Definitely prostate cancer.” No MRI, no biopsy, no staging. He stepped out of the room, and came back with a clinical nurse specialist carrying a folder full of printed pamphlets — prostate cancer, hormone therapy. She took me into a side room to talk me through them. I hadn’t yet landed on “prostate cancer”. The folder already had.
I was only properly diagnosed after seeking a second opinion on Harley Street. That is where the MRI happened. The biopsy. The staging. Advanced metastatic prostate cancer — Gleason 4+4, later interpreted as 4+5 by another medical diagnostics team. It had spread from my prostate to the lymph nodes, upper and lower spine, chest, and several places in my hips. I was 52 years old. I had a three-year-old daughter. A wife. A father who had already lost one son.
Freefalling
What followed is something I can only describe as freefalling, with nothing beneath me and nowhere to grab onto. I remember walking through Regent’s Park in February, Lynette and my daughter in the playground around the corner. I was praying — begging for more time. Pleading not to leave them too soon.
Triplet therapy
I began triplet therapy on the NHS at Weston Park Cancer Centre, Sheffield: androgen deprivation therapy, androgen receptor pathway inhibitor, and seven rounds of chemotherapy. The treatment hit hard. After the first session I developed severe neutropenia — my white blood cells dropped to almost zero — and spent five days in hospital with a fever that wouldn’t break. Chemo 2 was on my birthday. I turned purple and went into anaphylaxis before the nurses brought me back with adrenaline. I rang the bell in September 2025, but knew that the war had not been won.
By March 2026, my PSA was 0.12. No active tumours. My original prognosis of 2–4 years has potentially become 7–10. I’m winning — not cured, but winning.
What the numbers don’t tell you
What the numbers cannot capture is what treatment actually feels like from the inside. Within the first week on ADT, I was hit by a fatigue unlike anything I had ever experienced — not tiredness, but a physical heaviness that made even ordinary tasks feel like enormous effort. Bone pain in my back and legs — often so bad I can’t concentrate and can barely even sit up straight, let alone walk. A brain fog that turned concentration into a daily battle. I have not been able to work since I started treatment. I cannot complete a full day of meaningful activity, intellectual or physical. This is not exceptional — it is the common reality for men on long-term hormone therapy for advanced prostate cancer. Caught at stage 1 or 2, many men are treated with surgery or radiotherapy alone and never experience this. Caught late, as I was, the treatment that keeps you alive takes significant parts of your life away — sometimes permanently.
The Sleeping Dragon
The dragon inside me is not dead. He is sleeping. We have to keep him sleeping.
The Sleeping Dragon — Peter Wingrove, 2025I needed a way to hold the reality of palliative care without being destroyed by it. Not false hope. Not despair. Something in between — a liveable truth. I invented the Sleeping Dragon for myself first: the cancer is dormant, not gone. The treatment goal is to keep it sleeping for as long as possible.
And then I had to explain it to my daughter. Because she believes medicine makes people better. Because she was going to ask why Daddy still takes tablets if Daddy is better. So the Sleeping Dragon became her explanation too.
I’m not sharing this story for sympathy. I’m sharing it because prostate cancer is now the most commonly diagnosed cancer in the UK — and there is still no national screening programme. I had to argue with my GP for the blood test that saved my life. No man should have to do that.