The Prostate Cancer Test That Saved My Life
“So, yeah, it’s cancer.”
My urologist segued from talking about how inconvenient it was picking his daughter up at school that morning to dropping a cancer diagnosis on me without missing a beat. Two weeks earlier, I didn’t even have an urologist.
“Yeah,” he said, in a slightly nonplussed way, gazing at the results, “I was surprised myself.”
As my new, world-altering doctor spoke about cell cores and Gleason scores, probabilities of survival, incontinence and impotence, why surgery would be good and what kind would make the most sense, his voice literally faded out like every movie or TV show about a guy being told he had cancer… a classic Walter White moment, except I was me, and no one was filming anything at all.
I got diagnosed with prostate cancer Friday, June 13, 2014. On September 17 of that year, I got a test back telling me I was cancer-free. The three months in between were a crazy roller coaster ride with which about 180,000 men a year in America can identify.
Right after I got the news, still trying to process the key words echoing dimly in my head (probability of survival–vival-vival-val…” “incontinence-nence-nence-ence…), I promptly got on my computer and Googled “Men who had prostate cancer.” I had no idea what to do and needed to see some proof this was not the end of the world.
John Kerry… Joe Torre… excellent, both still going strong. Mandy Patinkin… Robert DeNiro. They’re vital. OK, great. Feeling relatively optimistic, I then of course had to do one more search, going dark and quickly tapping in “died of” in place of “had” in the search window.
If [my doctor] had waited, as the American Cancer Society recommends, until I was 50, I would not have known I had a growing tumor until two years after I got treated.
As I learned more about my disease (one of the key learnings is not to Google “people who died of prostate cancer” immediately after being diagnosed with prostate cancer), I was able to wrap my head around the fact that I was incredibly fortunate. Fortunate because my cancer was detected early enough to treat. And also because my internist gave me a test he didn’t have to.
