My doctors said they liked to do adjuvant radiation within six months. Earlier is probably better but they wanted to give me as much time as possible to try (and fail) to become continent. In the end we went ahead with the radiation anyway, timed so the treatments would
end just before my six month RP anniversary. As for hormones, I started them pretty much as soon as my post-op pathology report came back.
I hate my hormone therapy. Since you're new here I will warn you that I carp about
it endlessly. And that's after consciously trying to cut back on my whining. The only reason I let the doctors talk me into it is that there is some really good science coming out that suggests that, for men with high-risk cancer, combining a temporary course of HT with other treatments makes those other treatments work better... a
lot better.
Here's a study to talk to his doctors about: Adjuvant Androgen Deprivation for High-Risk Prostate Cancer After Radical Prostatectomy: SWOG S9921One thing to factor into your thinking, or at least a notion that factored significantly into mine, is the reduction in the rate of biochemical recurrence. Doctors will often down-play that marker since BCR doesn't always lead to metastaces, and seldom quickly, and metastaces do not always lead to big problems, at least not right away. The take-away is that BCR doesn't mean you are going to drop dead from the disease tomorrow, it is a milestone at which treatment strategies are re-evaluated.
For men with high-risk disease that re-evaluation almost always involves hormone therapy (which I have mentioned I don't like.) So, oddly, a big selling point for doing two years of HT now is that it reduces my odds of winding up on the stuff on a more-or-less permanent basis later.
So it seems to me that what ever else his doctors are thinking about
doing, they will probably want to get him on HT pretty quick.