Reading earlier posts about how hard it is to choose a treatment really drove home how unusual my prostate-cancer experience has been.

Things happened so fast for me in 2021 that we had to start with emergency debulking surgery for the lesion on my spine before we even knew what kind of cancer it was. Then we had to do the post-op radiation to my spine within in 4 weeks of the surgery.

Meanwhile, as soon as the biopsy result came back (2 days after the surgery), they started making arrangements for me to go on Firmagon and Erleada, because my cancer had been so aggressive and moved so quickly that they were worried about more lesions popping up. Meanwhile, I was paralysed in a hospital bed and fighting weeks of serious post-surgical complications.

The only real choices I made at the start was when I first met the oncologists and told them I wanted to fight as hard as possible, and when I agreed to join the IRONMAN study. Later, I said I did want to do radiation to my prostate as well, and it happened 6 months after the debulking surgery.

So I never really had the chance to join a forum like this or search the web for symptoms and treatments. They just kept wheeling me in a stretcher to different tests and appointments (sometimes several in a day).

Everything I learned about my treatment — that it was still new/cutting-edge in 2021, that it was based on just-published findings from the TITAN and STAMPEDE trials, that oncology was just _starting_ to recognise "oligometastatic" as a distinct category, that I was getting then-emergent treatments like "doublet therapy," "metastasis-directed therapy," "primary-directed therapy," etc — I found out after the fact.

I'm just happy I was sent to a major cancer research centre (I didn't even choose that — they bundled me into a decommissioned ambulance used for patient transport and drove me across town; it was all a race against time).