Rockers Who Took On Prostate Cancer

I get more hits on my blog entry, Famous Guys with Prostate Cancer, than all the other serious stuff about PC overtreatment,  unnecessary biopsies, lethal vs nonlethal PC, recurrence anxiety, exercise and prostate health, the alarming PC money tree, and so on....

Zappa

No, most people wanna know whose famous prostate went to hell just like theirs.  Why the fascination?  I suppose, we find a new and real way to relate to those icons we grew up, strange as it is.

As a runner, for instance, when I read Bill Rogers had PC and survived, no I can't relate to him breaking the tape four times in the NY marathon, or dropping the field on Heartbreak Hill to win four Bostons — but I sure can relate to "Boston Billy" running down prostate cancer, his probable peeing problems, biopsies, catheters, PSA anxiety, and all the other fun stuff. 

...Stills

I'm not a rock star but I love rock music — I'm a boomer, grown up on Zappa, CSNY, Grateful Dead, Dan Fogelberg. These guys or bands all got rocked by PC, and for some odd reason, especially for me with Stephen Stills, who laid the soundtrack on my wonderfully misguided youth ... surviving it with the guy who ripped Sweet Judy Blue Eyes makes me feel a tad better.

Me and Stephen. PC survivor sympatico. 

Then there's cranky Frank Zappa, music weirdness legend, founder of The Mothers of Invention ... some of these stony songs followed me for 40 years to my iPod. 

In looking for famous rockers with PC, I came across this interview on The Today Show with  Zappa, talking about the surprise of PC and testing back in 1992 ... and worth dropping in here:

"Well," the iconic innovator said, "I think it’s worthwhile being examined to find out whether or not you got it but on the other hand I had urinary problems over a period of years and was examined and they didn’t find it, and so that’s why it came as such a shock to me that I had it, because I had urinary problems for years…you can imagine how irate a person might be when informed, 'yeah, you got it but we can’t operate on it' ... so yeah, go have a a test but get another test, have a few tests....”

...Lesh

Zappa was quietly pissed at how things were turning out; recall that the PSA test had only been around a few years by 1990, and testing wasn't as widespread as it is today. To Zappa's anguish, PC ended up not being an old man's disease after all. He died in 1993, three years after being diagnosed. He was 52.

Grateful Dead bassist and composer Phil Lesh underwent successful prostate cancer surgery in 2006.

...Fogelberg

Singer/songwriter Dan Fogelberg, part of the “soft rock” movement of the 1970s, wasn't as lucky, and apparently had an aggressive strain of prostate cancer like Zappa.  He died from it in 2007, at 56.   

The following day, Crosby, Stills and Nash band member Graham Nash mentioned in a Larry King interview that his 62-year-old bandmate Stephen Stills had been diagnosed with PC and was planning to seek treatment. Stills underwent surgery for prostate cancer in 2008.

How 'bout Johnny Ramone—guitarist for The Ramones? He died of PC, at age 55, in 2004.  

So, what do rock stars have to do with prostate cancer?  Nothing at all, really.  Except we (the freshly diagnosed and/or curious survivors) seem to like to know about the famous who share our diseases, all the better and more relate-able if they riffed on our life's soundtrack back in the day ....