Treatment choices

Hi

Sorry to hear your difficult news but it is not all doom and gloom.  I am the same age as yourself with very similar dx.  My Gleason was 4:3 , so slightly more aggressive than yours.  PSA of 6.

I was not really given an option as a consequence of the Gleason score and strongly advised that Radical prostectomy was the right direction.

Cutting a long story short had the RARP on April 12th this year and it is now three months later.  I am back to full strength, fully continent (few drips when drinking alcohol in an evening).  The only real downside is the ED although this is slowly getting better and I had no nerve sparing curiously.  Using a pump to prevent penis atrophy.....feels surreal but advised it is the right thing to do.  

So all in all following the shock of the dx on Jan 2nd, I am in a surprising good place all things considered.  PSA is below 0.1 and surgeon is delighted with the outcome and I am for all intense and purposes cancer free.  (I am aware there is always the chance this can change going forward but I chose to believe I am cancer free and tell this to family and friends so life can get back to normal).

There are some great people in this community who will give you sound  advice on the other options available to you.  There other options available to you overseas depending on you bank balance and or critical life insurance cover.  I have a friend who has decided on proton beam therapy in the USA.

Good luck with your decision and I will look out for your progress over the next few months.

Kind regards

Steven 

Welcome to the club none of us asked to join!

It's pretty much been said already: with prostate cancer, we don't talk about cure too much, though it can happen, mostly when it's caught really early (stage I or II). For most of us, long term remission in a slow developing disease is the best we can hope for, and 50% of people with prostate cancer don't die of prostate cancer  - and most of that half aren't even particularly inconvenienced after the treatment.

Large scale, long term research shows that PCa survival is pretty much the same for most treatment options - and they all improve as technology and techniques develop over the years.

The really big difference is in the side effects profiles of the different options: they really are very different, and  - depending on your lifestyle and situation - one may be much more suitable than another. Cancer is always a life-changing event, but with prostate cancer, it's the treatment that forces the biggest changes.

On the bright side, with PCa, more than many cancers, usually allows you to 'live with cancer', rather than the alternative, for many years.

Probably true; the 50% has been bandied about fur a while now, and treatment has progressed. Not so much cure as extended remission, allowing meteor strikes etc.  to take their toll, I suspect!