Examining What Joe Biden's Going Through, A Year After I Got The Same News

Former President Biden's Cancer Diagnosis

Whether you liked what he did as president or hated it, the diagnosis President Biden and his family shared with the world should earn him your sympathies. There is no scarier time in a person's life than to hear the word cancer, much less to hear advanced stage, already metastasized, cancer. To be clear, I think Joe was an example of everything wrong in Washington, DC politics. To be even clearer, he has my sympathies. 

It was only a year ago, at 52, that doctors first told me the eerily same thing as President Biden's doctors have told him. The differences between the two of us are stark. Biden is a very rich man with a very connected family. As a prior president, he'll have access to the best health care. That's not something I can say. What I have that he doesn't is a degree of youth. We're about 30 years apart in age, so my body will withstand more of the onslaught that cancer causes than his. 

The effects of cancer, I suspect, are very much the same on both a physical and mental level. And for that, despite him having chances from a different angle that I might not have, I find my sympathies going out to his family and him.

What's President Biden Likely Going Through

As writers and news agencies were quick to cover the news about Biden, the one thing they couldn't cover was what President Biden is going through. That was because of two things. President Biden's news came through his office, and he hasn't yet gone into it publicly. And until you have heard the news aimed at you, you can't begin to fathom what the patient is going to endure. 

Prostate cancer is a tough one to deal with once the symptoms have begun to rear their ugly heads. And the symptoms aren't always as rough as the symptoms of the treatments. There are many good drugs, chemotherapies, and options for treating prostate cancer. They are stocked full of side effects that are moderately to potentially severely debilitating. 

From the news release, we can glean that one of two things led President Biden to seek medical aid. Urinary symptoms mean that he either had problems urinating, or was urinating too frequently or uncontrollably. After reading about the diagnosis and having experienced this myself, I don't want to guess which way his symptoms played out.

Then there is the pain of the diagnosis. Eventually, whether he's only recently finding out or he's been dealing with it for a while and could no longer hide it as a public figure, pain was going to set in. At 52, the pain began to set in. At 53, I feel it in my bones. I can still fight through pain more easily than a man in his 80s, and that's by no means knocking him for being old. But the realities of age are true; the younger you are, the more your body's resilience will keep you going. 

One thing that I will comment on, comparatively, is that if he was being treated for this over the past few years, and taking some of the same meds I had to fight to get insurance approvals for, his walking issues make more sense. As a side effect of staying alive, the treatment can, and often does, cause edema in the feet. It's not just a little edema, but enough to throw you off your balance and affect things like walking. While I haven't fallen yet, there have been days when I couldn't feel my feet because of the medicine that's keeping me alive and giving me more time with my family. Even when I didn't agree with President Biden, I respected his commitment to being there for his family. 

All of the physical toils aside, there's one thing that nobody tells you how to deal with because it's different for everyone: the reality of the fact that you're now dying. And that's where, as similar as cancer patients are, their differences begin to show. 

Death hits us all in different ways. For someone like President Biden, I can only imagine how he's feeling and thinking. Will we share that part of the experience? If so, then he's more afraid of leaving his family without him than fearful of his death, which, at his age, is probably, to a point, true. But death is the finality of life, and none of us knows, beyond faith, if there is anything else.

On some level, for all of us facing this as our daily reality, there is fear.

We're all different, and in his position, he has the best treatments and he has all the support in the world. With his Gleason scale of 9, which I will admit is bad, he's in for a fight. If I could offer him one thing, it's not to give up. Mine were 10s, and I'm still doing better than doctors expected. 

Do not go gentle into that good night. Old age should burn and rave at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of the light.

 - Dylan Thomas

Good luck, Mr. President