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.
