Ben Stiller revealed his health condition on SiriusXM's "The Howard Stern Show" on Tuesday. It turns out that he was diagnosed with "immediately aggressive" prostate cancer at the age of 48.
The actor appeared on Howard Stern's program together with his surgeon, Edward Schaeffer, and narrated his experience for the very first time in public.
"It came out of the blue for me," Ben said. "I had no idea."
"At first, I didn't know what was going to happen, so I was scared. I was scared," he shared. "The one thing that it does is it just stops everything in your life when you get a diagnosis of cancer, because you can't plan for a movie, because you don't know what's going to happen."
Ben also stated that their family has no history with prostate cancer. "My dad didn't have it," he told Stern. "I'm not in the high-risk group."
ENews said that even so, his doctor, Bernard Kruger, was the one who detected the disease through a Prostate-Specific Antigen (PSA) test in a yearly physical. The blood test examines and measures the amount of PSA in a patient's blood, that is produced by cancerous and noncancerous tissue in the prostate.
"It's a very controversial subject, the PSA test. A PSA test is the only early screener for prostate cancer, and right now the United States Preventative Services Task Force does not recommend to take the test. I think the American Cancer Society says you should discuss it at 50," Ben said. "If I hadn't gotten the test-my doctor started giving it to me about 46-right now I still wouldn't have known."
"The first thing I did when I got diagnosed was get on the Internet to try to learn," he said. "I saw [Robert] De Niro had had it. I called him right away." Ben, who is married to actress Christine Taylor, 45, told the news with their two children: Ella Stiller and Quinlin Stiller, ages 14 and 11 respectively. "I told them I had something I had to deal with," the actor recalled. "They were pretty cool with it."
When asked why he is sharing his story now, The Telegraph shared Ben's statement: "I wanted to talk about it because of the test. I feel like the test saved my life."
"The controversy about the test is that once you get treatment for prostate cancer, things can happen: incontinence, impotence," said Ben, who produced the new movie Why Him?. "It's the second most deadly cancer, but it's also one of the most survived cancers, if it's detected early."
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