I HAVE CANCER IN MY LYMPH NODES. WHAT DO I DO NOW?

There is cancer in your lymph nodes. Maybe you learned about this before surgery—maybe your surgeon looked at the lymph nodes, found cancer there, and decided not to remove your prostate. Maybe this has come about after surgery—perhaps you have already undergone a radical prostatectomy, and a pathologist has found some cancer in the lymph tissue that was removed during the operation.

What should you do now?

Every man, at every stage of prostate cancer, needs a course of action, a plan for the future. And right now, more than anything, you need answers.

Your doctor may draw up an immediate plan of attack: Radiation therapy, hormone therapy, chemotherapy, or even all of the above. Many well-meaning doctors suggest one or more of these options because they want to do something—anything—right away, to hold off the cancer for as long as possible.

But let’s wait a minute. Now, before you embrace any of these approaches, is the time for us to examine some hard facts together:

The first fact is that once prostate cancer has established itself in the lymph nodes, it has almost certainly set up shop at other sites as well, most commonly in bone. The second is that to cure the disease—to get rid of all the cancer—it would be necessary to find and eliminate cancer cells at all of these sites throughout the body.

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