My Predicament

[Guest guest]

As there is such a breadth and depth of knowledge regarding prostate cancer on this website, I would like to take the liberty of describing my predicament so that fellow sufferers can help me in arriving at a decision. I am 86 years old and in excellent health apart from the fact that I was diagnosed in August last year with T3 prostate cancer. I had a biopsy in which two cores were taken, each of which was 80% cancerous and my initial PSA reading was 94.6 which then rose within four months to 148 giving me a PSA doubling time of approximately 7 months. Since then I have been on Lupron/Prostap for five months which has brought my PSA reading down to 2.8. The Gleason score I was given is 7 (4 + 3). I have just finished reading Walsh's book on surviving prostate cancer and the message I get from it is that I face an inevitable death from prostate cancer within about 5/6 years given the fact that I have been offered neither radical prostatectomy nor radiation. I am interested in having HIFU in Munich to delay the inevitable, since in the paper written by Chaussy and Thueroff entitled "Robotic High-intensity Focused Ultrasound for Prostate Cancer: What Have We Learned in 15 Years of Clinical Use?", which is on the net, they detail the results of treatment of 168 patients in my situation. As the side-effects of HIFU would seem to compare favourably with radical prostatectomy and radiation and the chance of fistula would appear to be only about one in 200, I am seriously considering having this treatment there, and I would welcome your comments.Dennis Goffin