Over 1,000 miles for prostate surgery, clean slate

Grady Logan of Oklahoma City doesn’t have the patience for “watchful waiting.” 

The 59-year-old mechanical engineer, whose father died of prostate cancer at 86, had been keeping an eye on his serum prostate specific antigen (PSA) level and saw it rising more rapidly than he knew it should. He remembered a urologist who gave an informative lecture some four years earlier, accompanied by testimonials from grateful patients whose lives he had saved.

Now Grady Logan is one of those men.

Logan was among the first patients at Parma Community General Hospital to benefit from robot-assisted laparoscopic surgery, at the hands of  the medical director Carson Wong, MD, FRCSC, FACS. While new to Parma Hospital, Dr. Wong has a long history as a nationally recognized expert in endourologic, minimally invasive and robotic surgery. Dr. Wong has been ranked annually by Castle Connolly Medical Limited as one of “America’s Top Doctors” from 2008 to 2011, included in the Best Doctors of America 2011-12 edition and is rated in the Top 1 percent of urologists in the nation by U.S. News & World Report and Castle Connolly Medical Limited Top Doctors.

Dr. Wong was an Associate Professor of Urology at the University of Oklahoma and Medical Director of the Center for Robotic Surgery at OU Medical Center in Oklahoma City when Logan attended one of his community health events. Now a member of the Medical Staff at Parma Hospital, he welcomed Logan’s desire to come to Cleveland.

“Dr. Wong is very active in helping men return to the quality of life they had before surgery,” said Logan, who believes his father’s quality of life suffered after undergoing an open procedure to remove his prostate. “I was very impressed with Dr. Wong during the patient seminar. There was a genuine caring he had for those patients. 

“Now, I am the beneficiary of my observation.”

No imaging test can diagnose prostate cancer. Only a biopsy performed by a urologist can determine if cancer is present.  [see Men 50+ below] 

“Before routine serum PSA and digital rectal examination (DRE) screening were implemented in the mid 1980s, the diagnosis of prostate cancer was suspect only if it could be felt by DRE or a patient presented with disease that had spread to other parts of the body,” said Dr. Wong. “This sensitive screening tool, while not foolproof, gives urologists a gauge of a man’s prostate health.”

 “Routine prostate screening has allowed our profession to diagnose cancer at an earlier, curable stage,” says Dr. Wong. “Once diagnosed, each individual needs to be uniquely addressed when considering all available treatment options.”