Zoolander star Ben Stiller has revealed he was diagnosed with an aggressive prostate cancer two years ago.
Ben, now 50 and clear of the disease, has shared his story in the hope that men will start getting tested younger than the standard age of 50.
“It came out of the blue for me. I had no idea,” the father-of-two told shock jock Howard Stern.
“At first, I didn’t know what was going to happen. I was scared. It just stopped everything in your life because you can’t plan for a movie because you don’t know what’s going to happen.”
Ben says a preventative health exam called a Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) when he was 46 save his life.
Over the next year and a half, Ben’s doctor, Bernard Kruger, continued to monitor the actor’s PSA levels, testing him every six months.
When his levels continued to rise, Ben was sent to be examined by a urologist, who then ordered him to have an MRI screening of his prostrate.
When the results came back, the news was blunt: “So yeah, it’s cancer,” the urologist told Ben, who had an operation three months later to successfully remove the malignant tumour.
So, I had cancer a couple of years ago and I wanted to talk about it. And the test that saved my life. https://t.co/KWirBcRZ7D
— Ben Stiller (@RedHourBen) October 4, 2016
“What I had — and I’m healthy today because of it — was a thoughtful internist who felt like I was around the age to start checking my PSA level, and discussed it with me,” Ben writes later on the blog medium.com.
“If he had waited, as the American Cancer Society recommends, until I was 50, I would not have known I had a growing tumour until two years after I got treated.
If he had followed the US Preventive Services Task Force guidelines, I would have never gotten tested at all, and not have known I had cancer until it was way too late to treat successfully.”
In between doctor appointments, Ben says he began hitting Google to learn about his illness and to see who else had it. “John Kerry… Joe Torre … Excellent, both still going strong. Mandy Patinkin… Robert De Niro. 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.”
“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.”
For information about prostate cancer, visit the Prostate Cancer Foundation of Australia website at prostate.org.au.
