Thanks that is what I am doing now. Having a face to face with some of the best robotic surgeons in the Southeast US. I know you have to have some connection with the surgeon and trust him/her.
With all else being equal. If I have 2 surgeons that are competent and I feel both will do an excellent job. One does the freezing sections interoperative and the other does not. I would be inclined to go with the one that does the freezing and testing tissue interoperative just to give him a chance to take out additional tissue if in fact the margins are not clear.
I know the goal is to take out the minimal amount of tissue and only the prostate to preserve nerve bundles, damage to the sphinkter muscles etc, but I am also concerned with cancer at the margins and it seems to me, correct me if I am wrong, that the interoperative freezing of tissue and quick pathology is another good process for determing whether there is cancer at the margins. If so and the cancer is at the margin then the surgeon can take additional tissue out while you are under to hopefully get to a negative margin.
The other surgeon that just focuses on my PSA and Gleason score from the biopsy "assumes" that the cancer is confined to the prostate gland and proceeds with the surgery just to remove the prostate. (If the final pathology report comes back and the margins are clean then that was the correct prognosis, however, if the final pathology report comes back and shows cancer was found at the margins and possibly in the nerve bundles then I would really have liked to have had that interoperative frozen pathology which would have given the surgeon a different plan of attack such as cut wider, remove one nerve bundles and/or a few lymph nodes.
Am I over thinking this and does my logic make sense? (Another tool in the tool shed for the surgeon to rely on for proper surgical treatment is how I view this)
Anyone have any pros/cons to the freezing interoperatively. One surgeon told me it was old school to do this and it does not give an accurate reading.
Thanks In Advance for any comments