Posted 11/4/2015 11:58 AM (GMT 0)
After 1 year of ADT and 6 months of Docetaxel I recently had a Choline F-18 PET/CT-Scan. The scan shows that my primary cancer as well as all of my mets have been significantly reduced. The choline scan shows almost no metabolic cancer activity anywhere. That is in line with a massive drop of my PSA from initially 88.5µg/l to 0.06. So that's all great news!
However, there is one isolated spot in a package of lymph nodes that shows activity and has increased in size since my last scan 5 months ago. We do not know exactly what it is, but it might might be an aggressive DNA strand that is developing resistance to ADT.
My oncologist's initial reaction was to recommend surgery. I was glad to hear that - as conventional wisdom says that it is not worth the risk to operate on patients with metastatic disease unless there is a clinical problem.
The urologists however were sharing the "official" view. They said that there is no proven benefit to remove a package of lymph nodes with an isolated spot of activity once a patient has developed mets - even if the mets are sclerotised and show no metabolic activity. They also said that the surgery might be difficult as that package has shrunken significantly from the initial diagnosis and there might be scar tissue (caused by the ADT/chemo. So far I had no radiation or surgery).
So here are my questions: Is there anyone out there who had a similar situation and had their lymph node removed? Were there any problems during the surgery? What were the SEs after surgery? Did the surgery help to control the disease? Are there guys who had radiation instead of surgery? What was your experience?
Thank you all very much!