McCallum - The prostate monologues: what every man can learn from my humbling, confusing, and sometimes comical battle with prostate cancer

Bednarik: Last of the Sixty-Minute Men (with Chuck Bednarik)

Dream Team: How Michael, Magic, Larry, Charles, and the Greatest Team of All Time Conquered the World and Changed the Game of Basketball Forever

Foul Lines: A Pro Basketball Novel (with L. Jon Wertheim)

Full Circle: An Olympic Champion Shares His Breakthrough Story (with Dan Jansen)

Making It in America: The Life and Times of Rocky Aoki, Benihanas Pioneer

Seven Seconds or Less: My Season on the Bench with the Runnin and Gunnin Phoenix Suns

Shaq Attaq! (with Shaquille ONeal)

Sports Illustrated Book of the Apocalypse: Two Decades of Sports Absurdity

Unfinished Business: On and Off the Court with the 199091 Boston Celtics

To GEORGE B. YASSO

Who died too soon of prostate cancer but who got a lot done while he was here

If treatment for cure is necessary, is it possible? If possible, is it necessary?

WILLET WHITMORE, MD,

famed urologist and prostate cancer victim, on the problematic nature of treating prostate cancer

While we waited for dessert, the Swede let pass that he was indulging himself in a fattening zabaglione on top of the ziti only because, after having had his prostate removed a couple of months back, he was still some ten pounds underweight.

The operation went okay?

Just fine, he replied.

A couple friends of mine, I said, didnt emerge from that surgery as theyd hoped to. That operation can be a real catastrophe for a man, even if they get the cancer out.

Yes, that happens, I know.

One wound up impotent, I said. The others impotent and incontinent. Fellows my age. Its been rough for them. Desolating. It can leave you in diapers.

P HILIP R OTH , American Pastoral

G IVEN THE RESERVOIR OF DISPIRITING SUBJECTS explored by Philip Roth over his long career, it is not surprising that his fictional alter ego, Nathan Zuckerman, came upon prostate cancer in this 1997 novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. You want to get any man depressed, just bring up the sometimes intertwined complications of uncontrollable urinary function and insufficient erections and watch him grab his favorite NFL sponge toy and retreat to his man cave.

Let me make it clear that I have had the same operation as Roths protagonist, Seymour Swede Levov, and, like the Swede, I got off easy.

Kind of easy, anyway. Im still trying to figure that out, as youll see in the succeeding chapters. With this disease, see, you rarely get off easy. Even if youre not peeing like a one-year-old or having trouble in the bedroom as the commercials describe it, your eardrums are being assaulted by a Greek chorus of second-guessers.

You shouldnt have got it done! You shouldnt have got it done! Prostate cancer intervention has become in some quarters a kind of cosmetic surgery, the glandular counterpart to the nose job. To an increasing number of people both within and without the medical profession, prostate is the friendly cancer, so unlike pancreatic, brain, breast, and lung, and much more benevolent than its brothers, testicular and bladder. You can live a long time with prostate cancer. Just about every man in the universe will get it and he probably wont die of it. Why the hell did you make yourself impotent when you didnt have to?

Ah, but choose to live with prostate cancer instead of having it excised or irradiated and you hear a different chorus: Its still cancer. Any cancer can kill you. Advanced prostate cancer is as bad as any other kind of cancer. Why the hell are you risking death by doing nothing!

The two sides are locked in a debate that conjures up Rashomon, the celebrated Akira Kurosawa movie in which different characters relate incompatible versions of the same story. Mounds of data speak to the key questions of the prostate debate: How effective is PSA testing? At what age should men start to get tested? Does PSA testing prevent deaths? What is the best way to treat prostate cancer?but myriad ways of interpreting them. It is a medical Rorschach: One expert sees this, another sees that, a third sees something else. And when experts cant agree, it leaves the nonexpert in a quandary, as we are when we try to sift through conflicting investment advice.

At the very least, though, those of us in the Prostate Cancer Club can take pride that we clearly have the It malignancy, the male version of breast cancer, if you will. That is not a comment on the comparative severity of the diseases; it is merely to note that prostatewhile lacking a Susan G. Komenlike standard-bearer, the full-blown, pink-gloved, fund-raising partnership of the National Football League and a thousand weekend benefit runsis the cancer that these days is commanding much of the attention and almost all of the controversy.

President Barack Obama declared September 2012 the first Prostate Cancer Awareness Month in the United States. Two months later, theres another way to recognize prostate cancerMovember. Its a movement that began a decade ago in Australia in which men grow mustaches (a mo is Aussie shorthand for one) for mens health awareness, and it has now raised millions of dollars and has the official sanction of the Prostate Cancer Foundation. That organization was founded by the diseases deep-pocketed champion, Michael Milken, the junk bond villain turned medical philanthropist who is himself a prostate cancer survivor.

The Lehigh Valley Iron Pigs, a minor league baseball team in my area, has been active in prostate cancer awareness, combining ads from Urology Specialists of the Lehigh Valley with a foam finger giveaway, a not-so-subtle reminder that a doctors finger goes along with the digital rectal exam. The Iron Pigs have also added a Urinal Gaming System in all of their bathrooms at Coca-Cola Park. Men aim their stream to compete in various games, the scores of which can then be entered andget thisposted on the scoreboard for all to see. The system was added in conjunction with the Lehigh Valley Health Network with the express purpose of raising prostate awareness. Whether that will happen is a matter of conjecture, but there is little doubt that it has garnered the Pigs a huge amount of national publicity and a torrent of puns. Streaming media. Bladder up. Whiz Kids. You get the point.

Even at a Jethro Tull concert these days youre liable to get a prostate reminder (blessedly brief) orchestrated by flautist Ian Anderson, who has fronted the group since I was listening to them nearly five decades ago in college. A plant in the audience gets up in midsong, presumably to urinate, and Anderson calls attention to him. This leads to a skit, visible by shadowy pantomime behind a curtain, in which a man gets a digital rectal exam as Anderson talks about the importance of getting tested and images of rock performers Frank Zappa and Johnny Ramone flash on a video screen. Both died of the disease.

Still, there are other worlds for the prostate people to explore. They have not, for example, been as creative as advocates for another type of cancer who in March of 2013 managed to put up a 20-foot-long walk-through colon in New York Citys Times Square for National Colorectal Cancer Awareness Month. Kids, after we see the Statue of Liberty and the Empire State Building, your father wants to visit the Giant Colon.