Talking about this with your care team will be one of the most important conversations you've had in your life, and it's important that there's a lot of back-and-forth. Both surgery and radiation are much more precise and less damaging than they were in the past, and don't produce the same kind of collateral damage that they used to.

Radiation and surgery also have identical overall survival stats, so the choice isn't obvious if you have early-stage cancer that hasn't escaped the prostate yet. Radiation spreads a bit beyond the prostate (not much with proton-beam; a little with SBRT; and more with IMRT, if I understand correctly). That can be a bad thing for causing side effects like radiation cystitis or proctitis (not life-threatening, but annoying); it can be a *good* thing if the cancer has already started to sneak out of your prostate to the surrounding tissue, because it might kill that cancer as well, while simply removing the prostate would leave it in place.

I hope this helps you formulate the questions to ask your care team. Be stubborn, keep asking until you're sure you understand the answers, and get second opinions as needed. Don't worry about annoying people — it's your health. And make sure they're not pushing you to one option or another just because it's more familiar, cheaper, or more convenient for them. Also, bring someone with you to take notes, so that you can focus on the conversation without worrying about forgetting anything. It might also help to write down your questions in advance, so that you don't have to worry about forgetting one or two of them.