FORT COLLINS — For a little more than a year, Colorado State athletic director Paul Kowalczyk has known he has prostate cancer.
On July 22, a surgeon will remove Kowalczyk’s prostate, and the hope — and even the likelihood — is that the cancer hasn’t spread beyond the organ, and that the 52-year-old athletic director soon will be working again.
“If you’re going to get cancer, prostate cancer is the one to get because it’s slow-growing generally, and it’s treatable and curable,” Kowalczyk said in his office at the McGraw Athletic Center.
“Many people go through this. Many people have gone through a lot worse and gotten back up. I feel pretty fortunate that I was in a position where I don’t have a more severe case, and that if things go well, I’ll have it taken care of and move on.”
Kowalczyk agreed to publicly confirm his diagnosis and imminent radical prostatectomy because he won’t be visible on the job for several weeks, and also to be the latest to emphasize the wisdom of an annual checkup.
“There’s no way to describe the feeling you have when someone tells you that you have cancer,” said Kowalczyk, the Rams’ AD since April 2006.
The cancer was detected after his doctor expressed concerns during Kowalczyk’s 2009 physical. Kowalczyk underwent biopsies, and the diagnosis followed in June last year.
One doctor recommended immediate surgery. An alternative was radiation treatment. To help sort it out, Kowalczyk and his wife, Peg, visited Dr. Eric Klein at the Cleveland Clinic’s Glickman Urological and Kidney Institute.
Klein suggested “active surveillance,” with Kowalczyk undergoing a biopsy every six months to check if the cancer — common, slow-progressing and sometimes never detected in many men — would be relatively harmless.
Kowalczyk read several books about prostate cancer, explored material available on the Internet and even joined blog discussions, hearing others lecture him that he was making a mistake by waiting to see if the cancer would progress. He remembered one respondent telling him, “It’s like you’re running around with a hand grenade and you’ve pulled the pin.”
He decided to wait. While doctors monitored his prostate signs, Kowalczyk modified his eating habits and lost 10 pounds. However, the result of the latest biopsy signaled that inaction no longer was viable.
“It’s possible I waited too long,” he said, “but the indications from this latest biopsy also are that it hasn’t gone past the prostate. But I needed to do something now.”
In concert with his doctors, he opted for prostate removal over radiation, realizing there are secondary physical issues that probably will follow — at least temporarily.
But he’s willing to accept those, combat them and move forward.
Kowalczyk and his wife are leaving town this weekend on a personal trip, and he will undergo surgery when he returns. He hopes to be working again, at least on a limited basis, in mid-August.
“Once we figured all this out, it was that I’d rather knock it off as soon as I can, get the recovery going, and be on all cylinders in pre-football and into football,” Kowalczyk said.
Terry Frei: 303-954-1895 or tfrei@denverpost.com
Prostate cancer facts
Other than skin cancer, prostate cancer is the most common cancer in American men. A look at the latest American Cancer Society estimates for prostate cancer in the United States for 2010:
• About 217,730 new cases of prostate cancer will be diagnosed.
• About 32,050 men will die of prostate cancer.
• About one man in six will be diagnosed with prostate cancer during his lifetime. More than 2 million men in the United States who have been diagnosed with prostate cancer are alive today.
• Prostate cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in American men, behind only lung cancer. About one in 36 will die of prostate cancer. Prostate cancer accounts for about 11 percent of cancer-related deaths in men.
• According to the most recent data, for all men with prostate cancer, the relative five-year survival rate is nearly 100 percent and the relative 10-year survival rate is 91 percent.
Source: American Cancer Society
