I upvoted your comment because it is largely correct. Most cases of prostate cancer can be responded to by "watchful waiting" with no particular treatment. However, I will note for the record that the cause of death of my late father-in-law in Taiwan, who had good medical care under that country's single-payer national health insurance program, was metastasized prostate cancer. He had successful heart surgery and other treatments that prolonged his life into his eighties until the prostate cancer got him.
You may have taken away the wrong message from the surgeon, or maybe I'm reading it wrong. One of the major reasons breast cancer prognosis is so good is because it's often caught early. Pancreatic cancer has no early symptoms, so by the time it's caught it's often too late.
Indeed one school of thought is that improved detection methods system-wide are going to be the #1 factor in winning against cancer long-term.
I don't believe the statistics bear this out. In fact, there isn't a lot of evidence early detection of breast tumors does much to prolong life. If your metric is the number of years you live after the cancer is detected, then certainly early detection seems like a huge win. But that would be true even if you didn't do anything at all upon having detected the tumor.
A few years ago I built an event management website for a decently large lung-cancer awareness program. During some of the meetings, I met with a world-renowned surgeon who supported the cause and we got to talking about how the breast cancer movement had grown so large. His perspective on it shocked me. Basically he said that breast cancer, in the large scale scheme of diseases, is actually not that dangerous. The mortality rate is incredibly low. Cancers like pancreatic, however, are incredibly high. When a woman gets bc, the cause gains her, her sons/daughters, brothers/sisters, significant other, etc and that support lasts for the duration of treatment, and typically up to a year and a half to two years. With pancreatic cancer, the person usually dies, the family experiences a grieving period, and maybe only gets involved for a short period of time because they spent a large portion of their time focused on the disease in grieving. It was interesting to think about.
edit: changed prostate to pancreatic