Note that the 5–7 years I mentioned earlier was life expectancy; they told me the cancer would likely become castrate-resistant within a couple of years (which it hasn't).

Now they've extended both numbers indefinitely. The head of my onco team says there's a possibility of 10+ years before the ADT becomes ineffective.

With all the new treatments — androgen-reception inhibitors (check out the big TITAN study), treating oligometastatic cancer with curative rather than palliative intent, more-accurate imaging, etc etc — the truth is that they just don't know our long-term outlook yet because there aren't enough years of new data.

Like a lot of people here, I'm in the IRONMAN registry/study (called TruNTH up here in Canada), which will eventually set new baselines for what we can expect.

Much of what you read about overall survival for metastatic prostate cancer, even recent papers from credible scientific journals, will be based on data collected 8+ years ago when our prognosis would have been much grimmer.