Paella,
Firstly sorry that Mac still has the catheter in, but if there is a leak, then an extra week with a catheter is massively better than having the tube removed and having pee leak into the abdomional cavity.
What is not good is all the conflicting stuff you got told.
Okay so understanding pathology stuff is a headache. I'm Dutch and my report was done by a Portuguese pathologist working in a Dutch hospital (and much of it was written in Latin, or words that you can't find in dictionaries and can't get hits for with Google)
The most important details to pick out from Mac's are that Gleason is the same as before and that there are clean margins.
As to the F6, I'm guessing it's just how the samples were numbered for examiantion. My prostate was sliced up in various ways, in the three dimensions, to get suitable slices that could be looked up under the microscopeand grouped as A1 to A4, A5 to A7 and A8 to A26. And in addition to the microscopic examination there was also macroscopic examination which covers the weight and dimensions etc.
Thus for me a gland that weighed 43 grams was cut into 26 sections. They found some tumour in sections 3, 5, 6, 7, 16, 18, 20, 21 and 22, which made little sense to me until the nurse practioner took a ball point pen and drew on a lifesize picture of a cross section of the male body to show where the tumour would have been in order for it to be found in the slices mentioned.
Perhaps you should ask someone to translate your stats into a drawing. It's probably the most useful bit of paper I took home with me from the hospital.
It is very difficult to distinguish the details of tissue without staining it. Adipose tissue (=Fat) tends not to absorb the stain the same way as prostate cells and fat is usually a yellowy colour anyway. I'm guessing the lymph nodes were small and surrounded by fat. (But it all basically looks like a long-winded way of saying "Nothing was found in the Lymph nodes ie the NO part of the AJCC.
The MX means they didn't look for mets (and during an RP they don't and can't.)
The alteration to the AJCC "T3" business was as I understand it to simply class any case where a bit of tumour was found outside the gland the same way, rather than have several sub classifications for where exactly it was found.
There are loads of nerves (nerve bundles) in and around the prostate, the aim of surgeons is to save the correct ones if possible, but some nerves have to go or they can't remove the prostate.
This is not the time to have any doubts about
what the report says, so get your questions ready and double check with the uro when you have the cath removed if you think it will help. (And why not try and ask him to draw it for you.)
Then just keep yourself going down the recovery road with an eye on that first PSA test.
Alfred
PS the following site has images of the sort of thing the pathologist has to look at under the microscope. (I can understand about
1% of it)
www.google.nl/imgres?imgurl=http://www.webpathology.com/slides/slides/Prostate_Inflammation_Acute.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.webpathology.com/image.asp%3Fcase%3D15%26n%3D1&usg=__VqF5vT2tzZgaWAosVTgHtzQty8E=&h=487&w=650&sz=172&hl=nl&start=2&um=1&itbs=1&tbnid=cSPZiKBGliWfyM:&tbnh=103&tbnw=137&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dpathology%2Bprostate%26um%3D1%26hl%3Dnl%26lr%3D%26safe%3Doff%26tbs%3Disch:1