Giving the finger to prostate cancer
Michael Izen has been subjected to frequent probing over the past six years, but he is still alive and giving the finger to cancer.
Izen — who was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer at 45 and even penned a book about his experience — is not your average cancer survivor.
Nor does he have your average cancer.
The hereditary BRCA2 gene mutation is most commonly associated with breast and ovarian cancer in women, meaning the drug therapy that saved his life recently isn’t even approved for use on prostate cancer.
Izen is a featured speaker at the 2017 Inspiration Gala this Saturday to raise money for the B.C. Cancer Agency’s Hereditary Cancer Program.
He was so young and his condition so rare that when he reported to his doctors with “softwood lumber issues” they spent a good deal of time looking for everything but prostate cancer.
“My general practitioner noticed something amiss about 10 years ago during a ‘finger up the bum’ test and passed me to a specialist, who didn’t seem to think it was any big deal,” said Izen, an independent labour market analyst.
Because he is adopted, doctors had no family history and so no reason to suspect a hereditary cancer. Years went by until frequent soreness and the aforementioned erectile difficulties finally prompted more medical sleuthing. After antibiotics and psychological counselling failed, doctors started performing tests and ruling out possible causes.
Because of his relative youth and the absence of elevated PSAs (prostate-specific antigens), cancer was still far from top of mind.
“Eventually, they gave me a biopsy, in which Mr. Grabby goes up the backdoor 10 times for samples,” he recalled. “Maybe they should have done it earlier, but in another sense, this is not a test you volunteer for lightly.
“It was a horrible procedure and I think they only did it to rule cancer out, which would have pointed to something else.”
It did not rule cancer out. Cancer was very much in.
“I had aggressive and advanced prostate cancer, and soon after that the prostate was removed and I got hormone therapy,” he said.
Two years later, doctors ordered a genetic sequence of the tumour and found the unique BRCA2 variant.
“Around the time I had burned through all the available treatments and my cancer had metastasized to my liver, a new drug became available for BRCA2 cancers,” he said. “It was approved for breast and ovarian cancer, but not prostate cancer.”
That meant the drug was not covered by standard medical insurance. It came with an $8,000-amonth price tag, which was covered by an “angel donor” to the Vancouver Prostate Centre until its efficacy was established.
Free of liver tumours, his cancer showed up most recently on his spine, for which he has received radiation treatments. He continues to work and enjoy life with his wife and stepdaughter. “Two years ago, I was told that people in my condition last about one year,” he said. “So I wrote a book.”
Izen’s book Finger Up the Bum is an irreverent look at the realities and frequent indignities of his journey, illustrated with funny and sad cartoons by his brother, Jon.
Like virtually every person with a cancer diagnosis, Izen Googled his disease and found thousands of pages of information, exactly none of which spoke to him like men speak to each other.
“Men want to know what cancer feels like, what the treatments are like, and I explain it like I would to a buddy in the locker-room, the way one dude talks to another dude,” he said.