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Re: Just had surgery - less than one week out - fearful. 47 years old.
Leo,
It seems your surgery went well.
Now you just have to worry about a recurrence. Assuming your PSA was less than 20 then the worst case that I can see is that you get a recurrence sometime in the next 12 months and you will get radiation and six months of hormone treatment. I went through it at age 56 and it was about one-hundreth as bad as I expected; no side effects and really nice people that you get to meet everyday ;-)
A better situation is that you get a recurrence in 3-5 years and by then you might get treated with some advanced immune modifier treatment that has almost no side effects.
Best case, no recurrence. No matter what, I can't see you ever dying from prostate cancer.
- Frank
Re: Just had surgery - less than one week out - fearful. 47 years old.
G'day Leo,
Sorry to hear of your distress and concerns. These are quite understandable and may in part be due to the fact that your doctors haven't provided enough information to you. The dragons under the bed are always more frightening at night and often are found to have gone completely in daylight.
Please read up on the disease and get to understand what should scare you and what is......well, not so scary. I wrote up a bit I called The Elephant In The Room which may help you get a handle on these issues.
Finally, have you been reading the experiences of other men who have had a simialr experience to yours? The stories are indexed at TREATMENT EXPERIENCES
I hope you understand that your 3+3=6 Gleason Score is the minimum score you can have and still be said to have PCa. A score of 3+4=7 is not much higher and carries very little extra risk.
Like Frank, I'd be very surprised if the disease ever gets you. It hasn't got me yet - and I was diagnosed 15 years ago.
Good luck, keep asking questions and I'm sure you'll find that you gain knowledge and lose fear.
Re: Just had surgery - less than one week out - fearful. 47 years old.
Leo,
I had surgery more than 4 years ago, my Gleason was 4+3. Like you I had a very small amount of penetration of the capsule boundary but no infiltration into lymph nodes or seminal vesicles.
At my place of surgery, Waukesha Medical Center in Wisconsin, the standard protocol was to recommend follow up radiation if there was penetration. But the radiation should wait until full urinary continence had returned.
So three months after my surgery I did a radiation treatment series of only 60Gy, since the amount of penetration was so small.
I've never had to take any hormone treatments, my health is really excellent and my PSA is undetectable.
So this is another possible path. Read up.
