Radiation or not?

As you know, prostate cancer treatments are not one size fits all. What works for one may not be appropriate for another. One guy has minimal side effects and another has a rough time. With that disclaimer, I had SBRT radiation with a SpaceOAR placement. During my 5 treatments over 10 days I experienced fatigue and mild urinary discomfort. All side effects were gone after 2 weeks and everything is completely normal after about 7 months. My PSA was 15.47 prior to treatment and is now 0.33. I’m 69 years old and the cancer was graded as stage 2 and confined to the gland. One of 12 cores was positive and the Gleason was 4+3=7. We caught it very early and I’m otherwise in good health. All of that is part of why this treatment worked so well for me.

The Docs generally won’t talk in terms of cures with 100% certainty. In my case things couldn’t be going any better and my confidence in the future is very high.

: Deciding on which treatment is best is often a matter of choosing what you and your MD see as options, given the aggressiveness or spread of the PCa. I was offered either surgery or radiation back in 2012 because my Gleason score 9 was quite high, even though my PSA readings were low at 2.1.

I chose surgery back then, figuring if it returned (which it did), I had radiation as a backup. You will want to ask your MD what options you will have if the cancer returns after radiation. No one knows what the future holds. I had minor reactions to the 38 radiation treatments, which occurred some 5 years after my surgery in 2013 .

As a result of a scan in 2022, it showed up again as a spot on my hip bone, and then treated with 5 rounds of SBRT. All of my experiences with radiation so far have not had any real negative impacts on urine control, bowels etc. Dennis (ProstateC