New York, April 27, 2000. Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mayor of New York City, age 55, has prostate cancer. He began talking about it to the press the morning after his doctor told him over the phone that the results of a biopsy were positive.
"I was diagnosed yesterday," Giuliani said at 10 a.m. to a room crammed with reporters, "with a -- with prostate cancer. It's a treatable form of prostate cancer. It was diagnosed at an early stage."
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani
"I would urge everyone to get the P.S.A. test, there's nothing painful about the P.S.A. test. It's a blood test ... You should have it tested and find out."Mayor Giuliani talked openly in a natural way. He smiled a lot and conveyed that he had felt flustered and even shaken by hearing the news. "I keep getting positive and negative mixed up," he said about the phone call. "I kind of think of negative as bad and positive as good. So when he told me it was positive, it took me a second to figure out, oh, gee, that's not so good."
Giuliani said that he decided to break the news after a reporter saw him go into Mount Sinai Hospital for the biopsy visit -- which lasted about three hours.
The diagnosis "came about as a result of taking a P.S.A. test about two -- two and a half weeks ago," Giuliani said. "The P.S.A. was elevated. So I took antibiotics for a while. Took the P.S.A. test again, it remained elevated. So I went in for a biopsy yesterday and the biopsy revealed that several of the samples -- thank goodness not all and not most -- had indications of cancer."
Giuliani said that the cancer is "at a very, very early stage of the disease." This gives him "lots of possible options," he said. "And it's going to take a while to determine which option is the best one to bring about a complete cure."
"The options are the same for everybody," Giuliani said. "The options are radiation, hormones, seeds, which is a form of radiation, or operation depending on what you think gives you the best chance of success in curing -- in curing the disease, or what combination of those things and in what order that you want to do it."
"As you know," Giuliani said, "doctors have very different views of this and the reason that I'm going to take a week or two is you have to evaluate, you have to evaluate all of those different options and put them together."
"There is no reason," he said, " which I guess is also good news, there's no reason for me to have emergency treatment. I'm [not] going to have treatment tomorrow or the next day or the day after. At the same time, there's also no reason to extend it and it wouldn't be a good idea to extend it for months. So I'll decide within the next two to three weeks."
Rudy Giuliani knows about prostate cancer from watching his father die of the disease. "My father had prostate cancer 30 years ago, when the treatments didn't exist and when you could only really catch it at a much later stage because they didn't have P.S.A. tests. They had only physical examinations. And a physical examination would not have revealed this -- this form of cancer. So what he had was much more advanced than what I dealt with and he -- he died at 73 years old."
Rudy Giuliani's prostate cancer is running in daily news as a double whammy -- prostate cancer and the impact on the Senate race. Just when he is faced with "a series of pressing medical decisions in the weeks ahead," writes Adam Nagourney in the New York Times, the political calendar "could force Mr. Giuliani to make some pivotal decisions about his Senate candidacy rapidly, and over roughly the same difficult period of time" [Crucial Time for Options: Mayor Must Act Quickly, requires registration].
As Democrats and Republicans began speculating that Mr. Giuliani might drop out of the Senate race, some of his staff worked phones to say that he was staying in it.
"His head has not changed any about the Senate race at all," Nagourney reports one associate as saying. "This has not changed anything as far as his thoughts about pursuing the Senate race."
Giuliani himself sounded much more realistic when a reporter asked him how his diagnosis might affect his Senate race.
"I have no idea," he said. "I mean, I think in fairness to -- to me, to the Senate race, to the Republican Party, to all the parties and everybody else you need some time to think about it and I really need to know what the course of treatment is going to be before I can evaluate."
Giuliani is a normal man just diagnosed with cancer. He wants to be cured. "I hope that I'd be able to run, but I -- the choice that I'm going to make about treatment is going to be contingent upon the treatment that gives me the best opportunity to have a full and complete cure. And then after I determine that, then I will figure out does it make sense this year or doesn't it or whatever."
Good for him. Let's hope Rudy Giuliani grows ever more open and vocal and that he receives total support for sticking to his true priorities. We wish him the very best in building a medical team, selecting his best option, seeing his treatment through and achieving a cure.
