Biden, Cancer and Me

Last week we learned that former President Joe Biden has been diagnosed with an aggressive form of metastatic prostate cancer which had spread to his bones. Since prostate cancer is a slow moving cancer it is likely he has had this for several years and yet for some inexplicable reason he wasn’t tested for it since 2014.  How this happens to a vice-president and later president of the United States has raised not only questions about the competency of his physicians but fueled conspiracy theories that it was part of a larger cover-up that also included his mental decline which has been thrust into the open with the release of a new book by CNN’s Jake Tapper and Axios’ Alex Thompson that admits there was a concerted effort to hide Biden’s true condition during his short-lived 2024 re-election campaign.

Before we get too deep into massive cover-up theories we have to understand that prostate cancer strikes about one in twelve men and for men who reach 80, eight-eight percent have cancer cells in their prostate. Biden is 82 so the cancer diagnosis in and of itself isn’t unusual, but the timing of the diagnosis is suspicious.

I have personal experience with prostate cancer having been diagnosed with stage 3C almost 2 years ago. It spread to my pelvis and spine and I have received radiation treatments and am on testosterone lowering medication as well as a prostate cancer drug that so far has kept the cancer at bay. How long have I had it? I don’t know but I do know that I don’t have the top-notch medical care that Biden has access to and haven’t seen a doctor for a physical in years in part to laziness and the pandemic and am now paying the price.

While I can empathize with Biden over this diagnosis I am also perplexed that doctors chose to ignore testing Biden for this cancer apparently because of his age. Yes, it is possible that Biden could have died from something else besides prostate cancer-that’s what my doctor told me, but would have been easy enough to do with a blood test which he probably was already being given for other potential ailments and clued the doctors in on a possible problem. After all as vice president he was one heartbeat away from the presidency and as president he was the leader of the free world and had control over the nuclear codes.

There are probably many culprits in the failure to diagnose Biden’s cancer earlier, but this dereliction of duty could have led to electing a president with a life-threatening disease and a mental acuity issue and a high likelihood that we would have wound up with President Kamala Harris before he completed his second term.