Russ Rosenquist, an electrical engineer and Plano resident first met Cochran 19 years ago, when he was only 38 and accompanied a family member, who had been diagnosed with prostate cancer at age 69, to an appointment.
“I’ll never forget Dr. Cochran pointing at me and saying, ‘I’m going to start seeing you in two years,’” Rosenquist said. “At the time I didn’t give it much thought. I was young, healthy and active, and cancer was the last thing on my mind. But, two years later I started getting screened.”
Men with a family history of prostate cancer, like Rosenquist had, are nearly four times as likely to develop the disease.
Russ Rosenquist, pictured with his wife Dawn, chose HIFU as his prostate cancer treatment.
Rosenquist was diagnosed with prostate cancer at only 50 years old, and was confronted with the same choices that thousands of men in the United States face every day. The most common types of treatment, prostatectomy and radiation therapy, have side effects that may include long-lasting incontinence and impotence. Studies show that radical prostatectomy, which is regularly used to treat young men with the disease, can produce a loss of erectile function in as high as 30 percent of patients and 10 percent of patients have some degree of long-term incontinence.
While weighing his options, Cochran introduced an alternative, HIFU, which had a lower chance of side effects than other treatments, but there was a catch: the treatment was not approved at that time to be performed in the United States (it has sinced received clearence from FDA).
“Prostate cancer is usually a very curable cancer when diagnosed and treated early,” Cochran said.
“Most common treatment methods have good cure rates but surgery and radiation have considerable potential side effects and complications. Right now, HIFU is the leading edge treatment with the lowest rate of complications. It is also a non-invasive procedure that allows for maximum precision sparing the sensitive tissues around the prostate.”
Cochran had been traveling to surgery centers outside of the U.S. to perform the treatment on eligible patients, which ultimately Rosenquist decided to do. His wife of 30 years, Dawn, remembers the morning after the procedure, waking up in their hotel room in Cancun and watching the sunrise.
“Russ and I walked out to the hotel balcony and watched the most beautiful sunrise over the water that I had ever seen,” she said. “After all the stress of dealing with cancer and deciding to take a real leap of faith on HIFU, we both felt this overwhelming relief.”
The Rosenquists took a photo of that sunrise, and now six years later he is still healthy and without any long-lasting side effects.
