On Wednesday, October 6th Bob Freeborn from the Tacoma chapter of US TOO and Dr. James Kuan from the Swedish Urology Group shared information about post prostatectomy incontinence at the Presbyterian Church of Bellevue prostate cancer support group.
Dr. Kuan started the evening off with a great explanation of the causes of incontinence; the surgical and non-surgical treatment options; and when you should consider each. Then, Bob and Suzanne Freeborn shared his post prostate surgery journey. Not only did Bob provide a great story but he was kind enough to tell us about Us TOO. Check out the video above! Hats off to Jack Stevenson for doing a great job organizing the meeting!
I’m always amazed at the tremendous support that exists for dealing with the challenges of post prostatectomy incontinence. You don’t need to face it alone! Here’s a list of the great resources we heard from on Wednesday!
* [Tacoma Chapter of Us TOO](http://www.tpcsg.info)
* [Us TOO](http://www.ustoo.org) – Find a chapter in your area
* [Presbyterian Church Prostate Cancer support group](http://www.fpcbellevue.org/events.ashx?p=1101)
* [Swedish Urology Group](http://www.swedishurology.com)
**Below is a transcript of the video**
**Dawn:** Hi! I’m Dawn with BrokenHandle and I am here with Bob Freeborn from the Tacoma Chapter of the Us TOO group. Bob is going to tell us a little bit about what Us TOO is about.
Bob, welcome. Tell me about Us TOO.
**Bob:** Us TOO is an international non-profit organization that has about 325 different chapters all over the world, ten different countries – of course, most of them in the U.S. – and they are kind of an umbrella organization. I think there are only four or five people who work at Us TOO actually in Chicago but they provide a lot of resources to the local chapter in like pamphlets, brochures, and videos and things like that to support the local chapters.
The local chapters are really independent. Us TOO headquarters do not get involved with how the local folks would do things. They’re just there to provide the kind of support that I mentioned.
**Dawn:** Who attends Us TOO meetings?
**Bob:** Us TOO meetings are attended by pretty much all prostate cancer survivors. There are no other people that come. On one occasion, we’ve got a guy who comes in; he’s just interested in what we do. Also a lot of wives and companions come to our meetings, as well. Guys who have had cancer, had been through the prostate cancer treatment, and had cancer for a number of years all the way down to somebody who just got diagnosed two days ago or something like that.
**Dawn:** How often do you guys meet?
**Bob:** We meet in Tacoma twice a month. We meet in second Thursday and fourth Tuesday of the month.
**Dawn:** What is the meeting like?
**Bob:** It varies a lot. Thursday meetings are devoted to just providing a forum for the new guys and also people that have had cancer that maybe had just come back to ask questions and hear other men’s experiences with prostate cancer. It’s a great forum for newly diagnosed guys to just get introduced to all the information that’s out there and the experiences of other men who have gone through this, how they fared, what their treatments were like, what kind of drugs they’re on, all different aspects of it.
Then our Tuesday night meetings, we have a program of some kind where we have people come in and talk about everything from exercise to breakthrough therapy to surgery and everything in between. It all related to prostate cancer.
**Dawn:** And if Tacoma isn’t a convenient spot for somebody, how can they find a local meeting in their area?
**Bob:** UsTOO.org is the website. On the first page you come to, there’ll be “Find Local Chapters” and if you click on that it’ll take you to different states and then where the different chapters are located within the states. So it’s pretty easy. Then you click on that particular chapter and it’ll tell you who’s in charge of it, phone numbers, e-mails and that sort of thing.
**Dawn:** Great. Thank you so much for sharing about Us TOO.
**Bob:** You’re welcome.
**Dawn:** There’ll be links to the Us TOO website on the end of this post.
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