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So, what do you need to do as a patient to prepare for prostate cancer surgery?
Once, you made a decision with your surgeon, the preparation for prostate cancer surgery
is relatively simple. You need to feel comfortable and make sure that that's the decision that
you want, but once you have done that, typically I like to tell my patients to stop any blood
thinning medication for 7 to 10 days prior to the surgical procedure. So, if a patient
is on a baby aspirin or if they are on a blood thinning medication, once you have got a clearance
from your medical doctor, you should stop those medications because bleeding with any
surgical procedure is a risk of the procedure. The day before patients are having surgery,
I like to start them on a clear liquid diet and then I give them a small bowel prep with
magnesium citrate, its usually a small bottle of the drink that helps give the intestines
a clean out, much like what we do with colonoscopy, but this is typically a much easier prep to
do than that patients undergo a colonoscopy. Once the bowel has been prepped, typically
patients are allowed to eat anything or drink anything after midnight on the day before
their surgery and then they come in for their surgical procedure in the morning or early
afternoon and the surgical procedure is done. The preparation for prostate surgery whether
it's open surgical technique or robotic techniques that are used is relatively simple and relatively
painless for most patients.
Some prostate cancers are high risk, aggressive, and more likely to spread. Others are low
risk, least likely to have bad outcomes. The biopsy says cancer, but current diagnostic
tools provide limited information about how aggressive a man's individual disease is,
so most men decide to treat prostate cancer immediately. Once treated, many men experience
serious long-term side effects like incontinence and *** impotence. Immediate treatment
is not always needed, but right now a man can't be sure if his cancer is the kind that
is likely to require treatment or if he is okay to wait for now. What if there was a
test that could determine how aggressive prostate cancer is. Genomic health is developing a
new test to do just that. By reviewing the underlying biology of the tumor and using
genes from multiple biologic pathways, the test can predict the aggressiveness of prostate
cancer when diagnosed, allowing a man to make a more informed treatment decision with confidence,
taking care of himself with more information and greater peace of mind.