Dear Dr. Slawin, John Dodge and Pat Meyers:

Thank you for all of your help with my prostate cancer surgery. I am also thankful to have benefited from all of the prostate cancer patients who went before me and who helped Dr. Slawin, and others, refine procedures to increase my probability of being cured and decrease my probability of side effects. The entire process was much easier than I expected and the results couldn’t be much better:

b. I pretty much slept for about 10 hours after surgery;

c. 14 hours after surgery I started walking around the hospital halls;

d. 24 hours after surgery I left the hospital;

e. A period approximately 24-36 hours after surgery was probably the worst time for me. I couldn’t get very comfortable with the drain on one side and the catheter on the other and I was fairly sore from trying to stand up and walk around;

f. 48 hours after surgery Pat removed the drain and that afternoon my wife drove me back to Austin;

g. A week after surgery Pat removed the catheter. There were no incontinence issues at all except I leak a little urine sometimes when I sneeze. Potency issues started improving very soon as well, although I’m still not back to 100%;

h. 1 month after surgery Pat emailed that the surgical margins were negative and it looked like Dr. Slawin removed all of the cancer; and

i. 2 months after surgery Pat emailed that my PSA was less than a measurable level. I would definitely use Dr. Slawin again and recommend him without qualification. When I was attempting to select a surgeon, I found information about prostate surgeons to be relatively opaque. The reasons I went with Dr. Slawin included the following:

a. Dr. William Martin is the author of My Prostate and Me. His son and I are good friends and I know him from when he was a professor and I was a student at Rice. I called and asked his opinion. Dr. Martin recommended Dr. Slawin, his current urologist.

b. When Dr. Martin had prostate cancer, his surgeon was Dr. Peter Scardino, author of Dr. Peter Scardino’s Prostate Book. Dr. Scardino used to work with Dr. Slawin at Baylor and now works with another high profile prostate cancer surgeon, Dr. Guillonneau, at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York. If you read Dr. Scardino’s book you will note that Dr. Scardino holds Dr. Guillonneau in very high regard and Dr. Guillonneau appears to be exceptionally experienced and capable. That said, after working with both Dr. Guillonneau and Dr. Slawin, Dr. Scardino sent his own father to Dr. Slawin for surgery. I found this to be very persuasive.

c. After meeting with some top doctors in this field, I found Dr. Slawin to be the most impressive. In particular, Dr. Slawin was very focused on continuing to improve his technique and minimizing the variance of his outcomes, despite being at the cutting edge of his craft.

d. Dr. Slawin had the best outcome results of any doctor I found. In particular, his results and lack of side effects for patients under 50 were very impressive. There may be other doctors with similar results; outcome statistics on doctors don’t
appear to me to be very readily available and when they are available they may not be directly comparable because of definitional issues, etc. But I doubt that anyone has materially better results than Dr. Slawin.

e. A cardiologist friend of mine in Austin has a father-in-law who had prostate issues a few months before I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. When he thought his father-in-law might have prostate cancer he independently researched the issue and concluded that Dr. Slawin was the top choice for prostate cancer surgery.

f. Some other surgeons I considered and who were highly recommended don’t do minimally invasive surgery and/or don’t perform nearly as many surgeries per year as Dr. Slawin. Dr. Slawin performs 2 surgeries per day, 2 days per week. I don’t know how many weeks per year he does this but he probably performs 150-200 surgeries per year.

g. Some hospitals I talked to wouldn’t guarantee who my surgeon would be while Dr. Slawin guaranteed me he would be the surgeon. One quote I received from a medical resident with a condescending manner was, “Well, this is a teaching
hospital.” When I’m having surgery, if my choice is a hall of famer in the prime of his career vs., potentially, an unproven rookie even if he or she may be a first round draft pick, I don’t have much of a decision. Again, thank you very much for all of your help and I wish you the best with your new practice.

Very truly yours,

Jim Murray
Austin, Texas 78746

24 August 2007