A diagnosis of prostate cancer is a kick in the proverbial slats. Really. You don’t want to hear the word, “cancer,” at all…anytime…ever. But if you’re male, the best time to hear it is after a blood test comes back with your PSA number unusually elevated. The PSA number isn’t in and of itself a diagnosis, but it gets your attention.  Nobody wants to hear that there is a strong likelihood they’ve got cancer, but a high PSA number means that if you’ve got cancer, it’s down there, which lightens the diagnosis considerably. Joe Biden’s office announced on Sunday that he had been diagnosed with stage four prostate cancer on Friday. They did not provide many details beyond that, other than to say the cancer had spread from the prostate to nearby bones.  

Stage four prostate cancer is a 10 on the Gleason scale, which measures the severity of the disease, with 6 being the lowest score and 10 the highest. It's not a good diagnosis, but treatments have progressed to the point that it is not a death sentence. Specialists told the New York Times that with today’s treatments, Biden could be expected to live five to ten years after diagnosis and end up dying of natural causes rather than cancer of the prostate.  One specialist noted that Biden’s “moonshot” program to reduce cancer deaths, begun when he was vice president after his son Beau’s death from a brain tumor in 2015, probably contributed to the advances in treatment for the disease from which he now suffers. As vice president, Biden negotiated with Republicans in Congress for a $264 million increase in funding for the National Cancer........

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