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Why do some people have surgery at stage 4, while others don't?
Prostate Cancer | Last Active: Feb 16 4:41pm | Replies (4)Comment receiving replies
Yes, they used to think it was too late to deal with the prostate once cancer had spread beyond it, but thinking has changed with evidence from studies like STAMPEDE.
Radiation is less invasive than surgery, and can also be designed to go beyond the prostate to the surrounding area to catch local spread, but what matters is going after the primary (the "mothership") *somehow* to reduce the overall cancer burden.
In my case, I also had the large lesion on my spine at T3 surgically debulked and then radiated. That was primarily to restore my mobility after spinal compression and paraplegia, but it also had the benefit of further reducing my cancer burden, so that the cancer was already reeling when we hit it with systemic therapy (ADT+Apalutamide) for what may 🤞 turn out to have been a knockout blow.
Time will tell (4½ years and counting…)
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@northoftheborder
Why did they only offer me palliative care then? None of the doctors suggested targeting the tumor with radiation therapy.
I completed eight cycles of chemotherapy with docitaxel and ADT, and six months later they added apalutamide, which dropped my PSA to 0.
Now I'm very afraid that the cancer will become resistant.
I asked my doctor about radiation therapy, and he said radium and lutetium would be used later. But I still don't understand why radiation therapy can't be used now?