Difficulty in voiding after radiation treatment

I went through 20 cycles of 5500cGy. Urination got really tough towards the end. I have always been on 0.8mg tamsulosin as 0.4mg was not effective enough. Maybe bump up the tamsulosin. Also, very low carb diet might help by making urination more frequent.

Hi, just finished 20
Fractions at Mayo 3 weeks ago. Mine developed on 3 rd treatment day.
Flomax 0.4 mg daily. Since finishing treatments It has leveled out and has improved. I see light at the end of tunnel. Hang in there. Good Luck.

Actually, radiation is the first treatment for a large number of prostate cancer cases. They may put someone on ADT first, to try to shrink the prostate, so that the radiation is more effective. I know dozens of men who’ve had radiation first.

Most patients are offered radiation or surgery, and both result in similar long-term outcomes. There are some exceptions where surgery makes more sense to start with, but in a huge number of cases, radiation is sufficient to remove the cancer.

Doublet therapy is almost never the first step. It is only used in advanced cases where the cancer has already metastasized. The majority of people with prostate cancer have not reached that point yet, so double therapy is not used.

15 years ago when my prostate cancer was found, I had surgery because my father had radiation and still died from it. 3 1/2 years later, I had to have radiation because it came back. Only at that point was I put on ADT for six months, Two months before the actual radiation.

2 1/2 years later, it came back and I went on ADT (Lupron). 2 1/2 years later when I became castrate resistant, I finally went on doublet therapy (Zytiga)..

The vast majority of people only get double therapy after they have a reoccurrence.

I am very curious why your physician recommended radiation as the first step in treatment? Per my physician who was adamant about this, he said: "you never want to do radiation 'first' because it basically turns your prostate into a walnut sized chunk of concrete, making it impossible to perform a successful radical prostatectomy (RP) thereafter." He said, "you should always do the RP 'first', and if/when you need it, follow-up with radiation."
I know this for a fact as well: the father of the girl who cuts my hair is in a living hell for the rest of his life. He did radiation because he feared surgery. He screams and groans/moans from pain every time he "tries" to urinate. When she visits her parents home, she sits and watches her concerned mother cry as her father's screams are coming through the bathroom wall as he spends 20 minutes trying to urinate. He comes out of the bathroom looking haggard from his futile efforts. And of course, his urologist said that he is no longer a candidate for RP due to the complete course of radiation he went through. My recommendation: Before you get further down the line with radiation, you may want to re-visit the "radiation vs RP" topic (pros and cons of both) before it is potentially too late for the RP. Good luck...I wish you well.

Similar experience —> I only had 1 day of adverse side-effects during my 28 sessions of proton beam radiation treatments (during April-May 2021).
On the 3rd day of treatment, I had urinary issues. My RO told me that with some men there’s an inflammatory response to the radiation, and if that inflammation is near the urethra can cause the issues that I was experiencing.
He recommended that I take 2 Tamsulosin/day for the remainder of the treatments.
Everything cleared up by the next day; I haven’t had any issues since.