About once a year I skip breakfast and drive over to a nearby medical center to allow a nurse to jab a needle into my arm and withdraw a thimble full of blood.

For several days, I go through minor suspense. For the past nine years, the news has been reassuring: My prostate cancer hasn't returned. So here I sit, pounding out another column nearly a decade after a urologist called me at work to tell me I had the Big C down where my body produces the raw materials for offspring.

The heads-up came as a result of a PSA test ordered by my family doctor. A PSA test is quick, simple and nearly painless—if the nurse is skillful. The blood goes off to a lab, and a few days later you get a report: Either you’re all clear, or your blood contains an unusual supply of prostate-specific antigens, indicating that a cancer is under attack.

Now, according to The New York Times, “two major studies from the United States and Europe found that PSA testing . . . saves few if any lives, while exposing patients to aggressive and unnecessary treatments that can leave them impotent and incontinent.”

I called my urologist, Dr. Coleman Oswalt, in Mobile, and he reassured me that I did the right thing when I let him remove my cancerous prostate on July 1, 2000. Today I lead a pretty normal life, with inconveniences that seem inconsequential compared to the impotence of death. Maybe the cancer will yet return: Although my prostate is long gone, the cancer itself can attack elsewhere in my body. If it does, I can still hope to keep it at bay until something else gets me.

“Till something else gets me” is the grim hope of those who elect to treat their prostate cancers with benign neglect.

The recent put-down of PSA testing seems to be based on the premise that even if your cancer is detected, it probably won’t kill you until something else more lethal comes along.

Statistically, that may be true. When I had my cancer surgery, an older friend went to his doctor to ask whether he needed a PSA test. The doctor hooted him out of the office. At his age, prostate cancer wouldn’t have time to kill him. He died a couple of weeks ago from other causes. To the best of our knowledge, his prostate was still going strong.

But I have a feeling that benign neglect wouldn’t have worked in my case. I wasn’t having any unusual symptoms at the time of my first PSA. I had made a rare visit to my doctor to get something for a nasty cold. He gave me something for the cold and suggested that, oh by the way, I might want to get a PSA. A few days later, he told me that my PSA was borderline.

“You probably don’t have prostate cancer,” he told me, “but you ought to get a biopsy just to be sure.”

The biopsy was somewhat more unpleasant than the PSA test, but I still wasn’t worried until that call came: “You have prostate cancer.” In fact, it had spread over a considerable portion of the gland.

Oswalt outlined my options: I could have the prostate removed. I could use radiation to beat back the cancer and maybe wipe it out. Or I could settle for “watchful waiting” in the hope that the cancer wasn’t going anywhere in particular.

A thing called the Gleason scale helped me make up my mind. The cancer is graded on a scale from 1 to 10 to indicate how fast it is likely to progress. Mine scored a 7. That made it moderately aggressive. I wanted the monster removed, and I had the surgery.

After the operation, Oswalt gave me a bit of scary news: The cancer had progressed to the edge of the prostate and there was no way of knowing whether its tentacles had reached across the boundary. To be safe, I needed to go under the radiation gun to zap any cancer cells that might be lurking there.

Since then, I have known several individuals who grappled with prostate cancer. Not long after my surgery, I encountered a man in his 80s who was undergoing chemotherapy for prostate cancer. He was in his 70s when it was detected, and he elected to give something else a chance to kill him. That “something else” did not cooperate.

An old friend told me he was simultaneously battling emphysema and prostate cancer. He decided not to “rile the monster,” as he put it. He counted on the emphysema’s getting him first. He spent his last years breathing through an oxygen tube, but it was the cancer that finally got him.

Another old friend, four years my junior, decided to live with his prostate cancer rather than undergo surgery. The cancer took him a couple of years ago.

I don’t know what I would be doing today had I not taken that initial PSA test. Maybe I’d be undergoing chemo or hormone treatments or other advanced procedures. Or maybe I’d be examining grass roots from the bottom. 

I’m reminded of a story motivational speakers like to use about the old man who was spotted walking down the shore, picking up starfish that had been stranded on the beach and throwing them back into the ocean.

“Old man, you can never save all those starfish,” someone told him scornfully.

The old man calmly picked up a starfish and threw it into the welcoming arms of the tide.

“I saved that one,” he said.

I think the PSA test has saved at least one.

Readers may write Gene Owens at 317 Braeburn Drive, Anderson, S.C. 29621, or e-mail him at WadesDixieco@aol.com.