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Stage 3a, Group 9, just discovered. Dr. gave options but have question
Prostate Cancer | Last Active: Aug 30 10:08am | Replies (42)Comment receiving replies
Hi and welcome to the brotherhood that no one wants to be a member of. This is a wonderful forum that Mayor Clinic hosts. I am a fellow stage 3 Gleason 9 prostate cancer patient so I’m only sharing my personal experience and not giving medical advice.
As fellow Forum member northoftheborder stated you need to make certain that you are being treated at a center of excellence with a great track record of helping men with prostate cancer. Local community hospitals do their best but seldom have the resources as places like Mayo, MD Anderson, Northwestern Medicine and others. Here is a link to nationally recognized centers of excellence: https://www.cancer.gov/research/infrastructure/cancer-centers/find
A PET scan is a great idea as long as it is the more advanced PET-PSMA scan. That scan is most helpful for recognizing metastasis which is spread beyond the prostate itself.
Good luck on your journey. Please don’t hesitate to keep keep us informed as to your status. We’re interested in you and here you.
I strongly recommend you purchase the book surviving prostate cancer by Dr, Patrick Walsh and Dr. Edward Schaffer. It reflects state of the Art cancer care here in 2024. I own a copy and it’s given me great confidence in the care that I have received and will receive. https://www.amazon.com/Patrick-Walshs-Surviving-Prostate-Cancer/dp/1455504181 Personally, I think it’s the best $10 you’ll ever spend on understanding your disease.
According to Dr. Edward Schaffer, who is the head of urology at Northwestern medicine in Chicago, state of the treatment in 2024 for stage three prostate cancer patients is radical prostatectomy to debulk the cancer, radiation where appropriate such as the prostate basin and prostate lymph nodes and then up to two years of first and second generation ADT. Removing the prostate reduces the size of the battle that has to be fought with radiation and androgen deprivation therapy. This is well discussed in the book along with summaries of the research that has been done to determine the effectiveness of this protocol. I am a patient at Northwestern Medicine and this is the protocol that is being used for my case. Removing my prostate, which had extensive cancer along with extra capular extension and paraneural involvement on one side along with removing each of the locally available lymph nodes reduced the battle to the area around a single difficult to reach lymph node.
Replies to "Hi and welcome to the brotherhood that no one wants to be a member of. This..."
Have you had any radiation or ADT treatment at this point?
Unfortunately; Dr. Walsh's book does not address Stage T3 (seminal vesicle) involvement in his book. Very disappointing. Better researching it on the web.
Dr. Schaffer and his team of doctors at Northwestern University are probably the best in the country in terms of urology and prostate cancer. I don't live close enough to be a patient there, so I searched for a urologist in my State who received his MD from Northwestern. There was one, and he was taking new patients so I asked my primary care doctor for a referral to his practice.
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That's all great advice. I did decide to grab the book, and I found it helpful (to this forum's credit, it mainly helped me pull together the excellent information that I've already learned from fellow members here).
As far as treating the primary tumour (the "mothership", as Dr Walsh called it), radiation and surgery are about equally effective, especially if (as @robertmizek mentions) you still have radiation after the surgery to catch anything that might already have spread just outside the prostate. They both come with side effects, but (in my case, at least), nothing I'm not happy living with in exchange for being able to live.