Prostate Cancer Saved My Life. Let Me Explain.

Stomach Scan Revealed An Unexpected Tumor in My Lung. Lucky for Me.

What do Washington artist Abbey Griffin, Sen. Ted Kennedy and I have in common?

Unforeseen detection syndrome, or UDS. That's what I call it, anyway, and I've come to the conclusion that it's a good thing.

Sure, we know modern imaging techniques -- X-ray, CT, PET, MRI and ultrasound -- can confirm the presence of disease when specialists suspect its presence. I'm talking about something more serendipitous: the unexpected discovery of a serious medical condition by health professionals who were looking for something else.

Now I'm not suggesting all symptom-less people go and get a full-body scan, just in case. No way. Because some scans involve radiation exposure and all can lead to costly and invasive follow-up tests, many experts say that would do more harm than good.

But for those of us with good reason for testing -- as I had following a diagnosis for prostate cancer -- UDS may prevent deaths. As my daughter Kay said while visiting my hospital room little more than a year ago, "Dad, prostate cancer saved your life."

In May 1995, The Post published a special health section on prostate cancer. It included my story of diagnosis and treatment decision-making in 1994. Tests over the next decade indicated I had no further cause for concern.

So imagine how I felt when I learned in late 2006 that five needle biopsies of my prostate area were positive for cancer. A new tumor had emerged and there was concern it might have spread.

Scans of my bones, pelvis and abdomen were all clear -- suggesting the prostate cancer hadn't metastasized. But the stomach scan caught a couple of inches of my right lung in the picture -- and it wasn't pretty. A suspicious nodule was growing in the lung's lobe, apparently unrelated to my prostate cancer. A PET scan "lit up" the nodule, confirming it was a live growth.

On Halloween 14 months ago, I dressed up as a cancer patient and underwent surgery at Washington Hospital Center. The small mass was removed, along with the right lobe and a batch of lymph nodes. Pathology showed the tumor's features to be mostly that of small-cell lung cancer. (Yes, I used to smoke -- but quit in 1974.)

It is very rare to detect small-cell lung cancer at such an early stage. By the time I had symptoms, the surgeon said, the tumor would have been as large as a man's fist -- too big to remove surgically -- and the cancer probably would have spread beyond the lung. Five-year survival rates for such cases are poor.

I underwent four cycles of chemotherapy, ending about a year ago. CT and PET-CT scans showed nothing to worry about (other than calcification near a coronary artery). An MRI of the brain showed, as the old saw goes, nothing there.

This past spring we turned back to the prostate cancer, and I underwent eight weeks of daily radiation therapy at Sibley Memorial Hospital.