Cancer is this generation’s moonshot - and we’re stuck on the dark side

If anyone could have licked this thing it would have been Ryne Sandberg, and he did…until he didn’t.

Maybe it’s me, but it seems like everybody’s getting cancer these days. And in particular, prostate cancer. And despite its reputation as a slow-moving, eminently treatable cancer, people are dying of it in unnerving numbers.

People like baseball Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg, the second baseman who succumbed this week after being declared cancer-free last August, following his diagnosis of metastatic cancer in January of 2024. Last December, he gave his fans the shocking news that the cancer had returned and spread to other organs.¹

And just over a half a year later, he’s gone.

See this moving tribute from ESPN.

At age 65, a former star athlete like him should have been in perfect shape to handle this battle, with all the physical, financial and medical benefits accorded to one so accomplished and so beloved by so many.

I said “maybe it’s me” up top when I know that in fact it is me. Prostate cancer seems to be afflicting more people these days in part because my “C”-dar is especially sensitive, ever since my own diagnosis at about the same time Sandberg got his bad news. And when investigating who’s got it now, I tend to work my way back from the obituaries, which makes it seem like no one survives it. It’s hard to find success stories when you start with the obituaries. I just keep seeing people, notable people, who are dying of prostate cancer.

How could a case like Sandberg’s end so abruptly, and so poorly, when he must have been tracked closely and tested often - when in fact the cancer was originally discovered through routine screenings and early detections? He did everything right and yet it turned out so wrong.

I look at Wikipedia’s list of people who have had prostate cancer, which is the second leading cancer among males, and it doesn’t make for the most reassuring bedtime reading. In fact, after hearing about Sandberg last night, I obsessed over it for hours. I must have slept less than Cubs fans after they lost that playoff game to the Marlins. I needed to learn all that I could about the case. What was his chosen treatment? (He did it all - radiation, surgery, hormones, chemo.) What was his Gleason score (couldn’t find it) and how did it compare to mine? And how often was he tested - or did it matter? Was cancer going to win no matter what?

The Cubs may no longer be cursed. But we humans are. We’re smitten with mortality. Cancer itself is not undefeated, but it’s very hard to beat.

It all makes me realize why President Biden called cancer this generation’s “moonshot” - and he tried to marshal the resources of the government for the worthy cause of defeating it.

Remember when presidents did that - instead of marshaling resources to install gold toilets on airplanes and building concentration camps in swamps?

But now even Biden has prostate cancer, which seems to have snuck up on him the way it did on Sandberg, though God willing his treatments will be effective. Meanwhile the Cancer Moonshot, like all federal health initiatives under the Trump administration, now finds itself on the danger list.

It turns out it’s not just me - prostate cancer is on the rise, partly because of the aging population. The number of new cases annually is expected to rise from 1.4 million in 2020 to 2.9 million by 2040.

• See also: Alarming Rise in Rates of Advanced Prostate Cancer in California (USCF)

Part of the rise may also be due to a controversial 2007 study that questioned how effective prostate-specific antigen (PSA) tests are for screening. According to Scott Wheeler, M.D., a urologist at Southern Ocean Medical Center, this led to a decline in screenings, which has had lasting consequences. But screenings have now increased again, which has increased the rate of positive diagnoses. Some urologists still believe that too-frequent testing might lead to over-diagnosis and unnecessary treatment.

Tell that to Ryne Sandberg. Tell that to me. My strain was so aggressive and advanced that I might have been just weeks away from the dreaded metastasis - stage four - where the five-year survival rate plunges from about 90 to 30 percent. That’s where Sandberg landed when he got his terrible news. A 300 batting average might sound great (Sandberg’s lifetime average was .285), but it sucks as a mortality rate.

Obituaries aside, most people who get prostate cancer are able to survive it, dying of the proverbial “something else” years later. People like Joe Torre, Ben Stiller, Robert De Niro, John Kerry, Warren Buffett and Mandy Patinkin have inspiring stories to share - and I’m grateful to them for sharing them.

But I’m not comforted to the point of complacency, even though my most recent PSA test, the first since my surgery in March, indicated that the cancer is now “undetectable.”

So was the Titanic’s iceberg. In fact, so were the Cubs, until 2016.

I know now that that “undetectable” only means I’ve been granted the gift of some more time to make a difference. Doctors know quite a bit, but no doctor on earth really knows how much time that will be. If cancer is a moonshot, we’re all on the dark side of that moon.

“Days are like scrolls, wrote the 11th century rabbi, Bachya Ibn Pakuda. “Write on them only what you want to be remembered.”

That’s all we know. Make a new box score each day, and then pick up the pencil, and bat, and make another one tomorrow. Maybe all those box scores will mean something, when all is said and done.

And then there was today’s other news of a Manhattan shooter heading toward NFL headquarters carrying a note about brain trauma and CTE. Aside from the sheer horror and tragedy of the killings, this story highlights the knife’s edge that separates sports immortality (or in this case, a high school football player with brain trauma) from the most tragic of destinies.

Not even the immortals are immortal.

Lou Gehrig’s classic final message on July 4, 1939, fits very well with the Ryne Sandberg story. Like the Yankee’s legendary “iron man,” Sandberg also considered himself lucky. You can read Gehrig’s entire speech in the notes below.²

Ryne Sandberg was told he had licked it, that he was “cancer-free.” This larger-than-life baseball hero to a generation was going to make it. We know the Grim Reaper is batting 1,000, but Sandberg was going to brush him back with a high hard one.

But in the end, he, like all of us, could only wait for the Great Umpire’s call, unable to go to replay. He had used up his challenges. He had lived with such grace, not just this year but every year, and with the same chilling understanding that chastens me every day. No one really knows what those danged cancer cells are up to.

Ryne is gone.

Say it ain’t so!

NOTES:

1. His Instagram posts, from last December and last week:

2. Gehrig’s speech, from the Baseball Hall of Fame site: