As we age there are certain tests that we have to take based on our age, such as prostate exam, mammogram and others. It’s not pleasant, but it can be life-saving. Ben Stiller recently revealed that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2014. The actor is now cancer-free, but he feels that now is the right time to talk about it because that routine doctor’s visit and early prostate exam saved his life.
“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,” he wrote on Medium. He has no history of prostate cancer in his family and he’s not in the high-risk group either, and absolutely no symptoms.
Like many other people that are recently diagnosed with cancer, they think about death, which is the worst possible scenario. “As I learned more about my disease (one of the key learning 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 [doctor of internal medicine] gave me a test he didn’t have to,” he explains.
Stiller was given the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test. This is a controversial test because the National Health Service says that the test is “unreliable” and can suggest that a person has prostate cancer when no cancer exists. “The bottom line for me: I was lucky enough to have a doctor who gave me what they call a ‘baseline’ PSA test when I was about 46,” he writes.
He’s grateful to the internist who recommended that he take that test, even though he was a bit younger than the recommended age group. “If he 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,” says Stiller. By the time he would’ve turned 50 it might have been too late to treat successfully.