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♪ - [Bob]

Paducah is a great little town. It's just...it's a really good community. I have a therapy dog, Joey, and we've been working in hospitals and nursing homes for about eight years.

If you think you have a problem, stop and talk to somebody, and in about 10 minutes, you know, you really kind of walk away thinking, "It's not as bad as I really thought." I had no pep in my step, and I said, "No gas in my tank." That's what I'd tell my wife Terry. I had been doing a yearly PSA test, and my PSA test came back with a elevated number, so we went to see Dr.

Spicer, the urologist, and he ended up suggesting a biopsy. I'll never forget, you know, when he came in. He's a wonderful person. And he closed the door with Terry and I and he says, "I've got bad news."

When you hear that word that you have cancer, it's just like... it's hard to describe. You just...I almost felt faint. It was a blessing to know that the Ray & Kay Eckstein Cancer Care Center was available and that they had Dr.

Locken, and the ability to treat me here at home in my own back yard, which meant just a ton to me because my mother is here. She's 91 years young, and my wife and my work and my dogs, and just the community.

- [Dr. Locken]

The community really attracted me. And then what kept me, and has made me stay here, has been the dedication of Baptist Health Paducah towards oncology. We have state of the art technology and facilities. I truly believe that we have world-class cancer care here.

And the delivery of radiation, it's like an X-ray table. Most everybody's had an X-ray, they're hard, they're flat. In order to accommodate Bob, we needed to develop some support devices that would allow him relief from his back pain, but still keep him immobilized so we could target the tumor we were treating.

- He was genuinely concerned that, you know, we get this done and we get it done properly. And he managed to make that happen, you know, with his team. I can't say enough good about Dr. Locken.

He's just one cool dude.

- [Lisa]

The spirit of cancer patients, they are very strong. They're often worried about the people that are there with them.

- I love nurse Lisa. It didn't take long at all and I felt like I could just talk to her just, you know, like a best friend. You can teach somebody to do a job, but you can't teach people to have the compassion they had. It was the difference between to be able to make all 43 treatments or not.

- [Veretta]

I feel like anyone that I come in contact with, I would treat them as if it was my family, if it was my brother, my sister, or my mom. And I think here, we do put our patients first.

- The goal is to finish the radiation, and there's a bell on the lobby. That's something that kind of you look forward to doing, was being able to ring the bell. We had Kirchhoff cookies that were made in the bell shape. I took those, the last day, on a Monday, when I actually rang the bell.

And I was so thankful to be able to stay here. Being able to leave there every day and come home and get in my own recliner, and have my own bed and my own shower, it was just a beautiful thing. Baptist Health gave me a new chance at life right here in my own backyard. Beautiful place, great food too.

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♪

Some of the benefits of seeing a lactation consultant after leaving the hospital is once your milk's in, you can see how much the baby is transferring over when it breastfeeds. A lot of times women need that reassurance so that they know that their baby's getting enough. I really encourage moms to try to be exclusively breastfed because of that being so important to the baby's immune system. And when you get digging into the research, breast milk is not just food.

It's like medicine for the baby. And the benefits to mom is astronomical. Astronomical. You know, for mom to stay healthier throughout her life by breastfeeding, she is decreasing her chance of breast cancer, uterine cancer, type two diabetes later in life, and hypertension later in life.

You know, these are huge health benefits that she's getting by breastfeeding. I just feel passionate that moms need to know this and moms need to do what's gonna make them healthier and their baby healthier. With my years of experience helping moms breast feed, moms come in with sore nipples. I know right then that the latch usually is the problem.

I tell her, you show me what you do, and she'll get her baby on just like she always does. I look and see that the baby's latch is good. And if I don't see that it's good, then I give her some suggestions how to make it better. And a lot of times, that'll fix the soreness.

That'll fix the baby's transfer. And then when the baby transfers, then it's getting good. Usually, once we fix the latch, mama see the baby will go to nursing fifteen minutes on each side, and mom's not a sore, and baby's more satisfied. He gets more sleep, mom gets more sleep.

Win win.

Stereotactic body radiation therapy is a special technique that's easier to abbreviate SBRT, a little bit shorter, easier to say. Specifically, it's a very unique technique that allows us to be very precise to deliver high doses of radiation therapy to small targets. There are a number of patients that are good candidates for this. Lung cancer is a very good one, especially small solitary nodules, things that are metastatic to a different site that they can't operate on.

We can treat bone. We can treat near the spinal cord. We can treat brain lesions. We can treat solitary bone, rib, muscle.

So it's a technique that can be employed throughout almost anywhere in the body. You just have to pay very close attention to what the tumor needs and what the normal tissues can tolerate. The benefits of using SBRT are very important to the patient because it can be delivered close to home. We are here in Corbin.

You don't need to go to Lexington or Knoxville for something that we offer here. The other benefits are it's only one to five treatments, so they're not coming in frequently. It's easier on the patient. It's easier on the family.

Because the dose is so precise and the target is so small, the side effect profile is also small. Patients tolerate it quite well.

It's a wonderful and rewarding feeling for the physician to be able to offer this type of treatment. I've seen the benefits quickly, and I see it how it affects the patients, how it affects the family. And be able to do this here at home for them is very rewarding.

Any men that have increased difficulty with urinating, including straining, getting up at night, or having to run urgently or frequently to the bathroom might have an enlarged prostate, and they should all be evaluated by a urologist.

Aquablation therapy is a minimally invasive invasive procedure for enlarged prostates or BPH, and it's one of the most recent developments and technologies for men with enlarged prostates. The main difference in this treatment is it doesn't use cautery to resect the prostate. It uses a high velocity water jet, and because of that, the recovery from the procedure is much faster while having maintained its equal effectiveness.

In our follow-up visits, I've noticed a significant change in patient's urinary symptoms from before and after the procedure. They're most happy with their ability to empty their bladder much faster and easier and without straining. They also tend to not have to run to the restroom as urgently or frequently after the procedure. They also have had no issues with patients with incontinence or leakage afterwards, and they are able to maintain their erectile functions, so overall we're able to treat this problem without causing any significant side effects. Baptist Floyd now offers this procedure and that's an indication of their dedication to the patients in their local community using one of the latest and greatest technologies for men out in our community.

At Baptist Health, we we take pride in providing the cutting edge technology, and we have made a lot of efforts to diagnose lung cancer early on. We do realize that lung cancer incidence is pretty high in our community, and that's why our goal is to get lung nodule detected early on so we can cure them sooner. Diagnosis, it starts with a CT scan of the chest. It's a low dose CT scan, and it's noninvasive imaging.

Anyone who is between the ages of fifty and eighty years of age, who has a twenty year pack smoking year history qualifies for a low dose CT scan.

When patient get a CT scan of the chest, as you're laying on the table, the table is sliding into the machine, which we are taking multiple slices. Each slice is just like a bread slice, and I'm scanning it through for any abnormality. And it gives us so much information that's valuable that we can look later on and discuss with the patient if there's any concerning findings or not.

These screenings take two to three minutes to go through the machine. There's no prep for it. It will take you longer to get registered, and the results will be in your chart in two to three days, and you can discuss that with your primary care doctor. Medicare and Medicaid and most insurances do cover the screening.

I tell patients if we find lung cancer at early stage, which would be stage one, the chance of cure with treatment gets close to ninety percent that they were still alive in five years.

Erectile dysfunction is a very common disease. It affects over half of men between the ages of forty and seventy. Around fifty two percent of men suffer from some form of erectile dysfunction.

Out of all of the treatments that we have for erectile dysfunction, P and L implant by far exceeds in satisfaction rate, and most of my patients come out of implant wishing they would have had it sooner. The implant restores a patient's natural anatomy. A man's erection is obtained by blood filling the two natural water balloons within the penis called the corpora cavernosum. We replace that with two water balloons basically is what I tell patients.

There's a small pump within the scrotum that when they want an erection, they reach for the pump, squeeze the pump to send water into those cylinders for a reservoir that's in the abdomen, and then they have their erection. The procedure is one small incision right above the base of the penis. Through that, we're able to perform the entire procedure. There's some discomfort and swelling.

Most men go home, rest and relax, and then most guys are using their implant about a month after placement. Erectile dysfunction does not just impact a man man physically. It impacts a man on a deeply emotional level, and because of that, it oftentimes affects their partner as well as their loved ones. Men don't wanna be intimate just because they know that they can engage in sexual activity if it comes to that.

So I really believe a lot of patients really do feel whole again, truly like a man again, just by having the implant. And so to be able to provide that service here in Hardeen County and the surrounding areas is really truly an honor.

Colon and rectal cancer used to be the fourth most common cancer causing death in the United States, but it's become the second most common in women and the first most common in men. Here in Kentucky, we have the highest rate of colon cancer in young people that are less than fifty years old in the whole country. Current screening protocols call for everyone to be screened by age forty five, but some people need to be screened earlier. If you have family history of colon polyps or colon cancer or certain symptoms, it's important to get screened earlier so we can help people identify those problems and make sure that they get screened in an adequate time to detect their disease early or prevent it from developing altogether.

The best screening modality for colon cancer is a colonoscopy because we can identify lesions that can grow into cancers eventually and remove them at the time of the colonoscopy, preventing you from ever getting cancer. If we find an abnormal lesion during your colonoscopy that requires surgery, most of the time, we're able to do that through a minimally invasive technique, meaning that we use small incisions that you spend a shorter amount of time in the hospital and have a much easier recovery afterwards.

Here in LaGrange, we are able to offer the same colon and rectal surgical care that you can get in a big city, but in a smaller setting that's closer to home with welcoming staff that truly care about the community because most of them live in it.