Because of fairly severe prostate issues ( won't go into it) I had what's called a "simple prostatectomy" a year ago. But its not simple. They did it by robot at USC. The surgery lasted 5 hours all the while your basically standing on your head with your feet straight up. Because of that when surgery is done your head is the size of a large melon. They essentially go through the bladder into the prostate gland and carve out the enlarged insides of the gland. Much like if you scraped all the fruit out of an orange leaving only the outside skin. the prostate than shrinks making you pee like you were 12 yrs old again. However because they routinely take the stuff that they took out for biopsy they discover a very slight cancerous cell that will have to be monitored. So I have a PSA test -for this first year-every quarter. So far it's gone from a 13 to a 1.3-which is excellent. I return to USC in a few months and hopefully they will say I only need the PSA blood test once or twice a year.
What seems ironic is that if you have prostate cancer and it has not metastasized (spread outsize the prostate gland) they -among other options-do a radical prostatectomy where they surgically remove the entire gland. That procedure is much much simpler than what I went through which caused me to be in the hospital for a week recovering. I guess its because they can simply take out the entire gland whereas what I went through is they have to get inside the gland and carve out the insides and then repair the trauma to the gland due to the surgery.
For those that do have high PSAs and accompanying prostate issues (I'm sure you can imagine what those are) I can highly recommend USC where the surgery-either simple or radical-is done by robot as opposed to a surgeon whose hands are working in a pool of blood and where the cutting of a vein carries the much higher risk of sexual impotence than the procedure by robot. The operator of the robot has this enormous TV screen in HD where he can see precisely where he's at at any time. The problem is finding a surgeon who is skilled enough in utilizing the robot since it is a relatively new discipline. There are several who are trained but might just do one or two a month. You need someone that does several every week and works is a research hospital like USC where they don't have to worry about sustaining a practice.
OK-now I'm off this subject.
