Hi Jayno8054, and welcome, though sorry you have to be here, your choice of treatment is for you and your team to decide, and a lot will depend on where exactly your cancer is, stage 3 and T3 are the same, and indicate your cancer has broken the shell of your prostate, though hopefully it has not reached anywhere else, but it does mean you should be starting treatment asap as your cancer has aggressive characteristics, you can have hormone therapy with radiotherapy and surgery, and I would be asking my team why your not on it already. Radiotherapy RT is usually done about 6 months after starting hormone therapy HT, this is to give HT time to shrink the tumour so giving RT a much better chance of being successful. Surgery can be done within a few weeks, You can have surgery followed later on with RT/HT, but not the other way round, both options have their plusses and minuses, and you should talk to both your surgeon and oncologist, before making a decision, as they often push for their own treatments, especially surgeons, best wishes

Eddie

Hello Jayno, and thank you for posting.

As we are not part of your hospital team, it will be difficult for us to be too specific in our answers to your 3 questions.

What I can say is that we have stages and grades of prostate cancer discussed on our website, so that you can understand the term T3a.

We also have the treatment for prostate cancer on our webpages so that you can see what is generally used in the NHS. The specialist involved will know which treatments to use in each situation, but the decision may be made on patient suitability and/or the patient's preference when told about potential side effects.

There is no timeline I can show you for each of these, but there is sometimes an order, again depending on an individual's situation. For example, hormone therapy would be given after surgery.

The specialist involved in this situation will have discussed this case with other members of the hospital's multidisciplinary team (MDT), and they will have created a plan that they feel gives the best outcome. In some situations, patients are asked to make decisions themselves, and this would involve reading about the treatments and their side effects and deciding what feels most suitable.

For more information on prostate cancer, do look at Prostate Cancer UK, or you may want to make another post in the 'newly diagnosed' section of the forum if you want to hear from others who may be going through similar.

Take care and if you want to talk things through with the nurses the number on the helpline is 0808 800 4040. Lines are open mon-fri, 9-5.

Sarah.