2/2/97

By time symptoms show up, it's too late

Chuck Snook had no idea why he was getting up to urinate so often during the night.

"I enjoyed my beer," he thought. "Well, I sure can't hold my beer anymore."

Then, too, there is the jock mentality, he said. You don't need a doctor; you play through pain. But in the autumn of 1994, he mentioned the frequent urination to a friend, who also happened to be a nurse. She told him he ought to have the problem checked.

"And to this day," he adds, "I'm really amazed that I did."

That's when he found out he had prostate cancer, that it was in an advanced stage, that it was incurable and that he would die from it. He's also learned a lot more.

For instance:

  • The prostate is a walnut-size gland that surrounds the urethra. It produces part of the seminal fluid.
  • Some growth and hardness is normal with age. Sometimes that causes urinary problems such as increased frequency, inability to postpone it, weak flow, difficulty starting urination, stopping and starting several times, and inability to empty bladder.
  • 40,000 American men die each year of prostate cancer.
  • 80 percent of American men will get prostate cancer, but most will die of something else.
  • There are no symptoms of prostate cancer in the early stages.
  • Prostate cancer is more prevalent in black men, and less in Oriental men, than in white men.
  • The American Cancer Society recommends a digital (finger) rectal examination for every man older than 39 in his annual physical, and prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood testing every year for men older than 49.
  • Treatments include surgery, hormones, radiation and drugs, depending upon age and health of the patient and progress of the cancer.
  • Harry Belafonte, Robert Dole, Jerry Lewis, Len Dawson and Arnold Palmer are prostate cancer survivors.

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