When you’re diagnosed with prostate cancer, it often becomes your life.
Too often, patients with prostate cancer let their cancer define them. You drive to doctor’s appointments, sit through treatments, talk about your recovery, your Gleason score, your PSA tests, and the cancer itself.
Insurance companies can often make matters worse. They don’t work for you. It can seem like they don’t even see you as a person. Instead, you are assessed in terms of your risk.
Men with prostate cancer can find it hard to assert their individuality over the struggle with cancer. Below we’ve compiled a list of men who didn’t let their cancer define them in the hopes that it will inspire you to reclaim your individuality.
Nelson Mandela
South African philanthropist and politician Nelson Mandela was born in July of 1918. He was elected President of South Africa in 1994, a position that he held until 1999.
An avid anti-apartheid activist, Mandela focused on eradicating the poverty and racial inequity ingrained South Africa’s history and culture.
Mandela studied law at Fort Hare University, in Alice, and moved to Johannesburg in 1943 to continue his studies at the University of Witwatersrand. Around this time, Mandela became actively involved in politics, denouncing imperialism and colonialism, and joined the African National Congress. Mandela rose to prominence in the ANC’s 1952 Defiance Campaign, a movement based on non-cooperation with discriminatory and unjust laws.
In 1962 Mandela was arrested for treason by the South African government, and jailed for 27 years.
Following his release, Mandela was elected President of the African National Congress, in 1991. Mandela began working with then-President Frederik Willem de Klerk, to peacefully end South Africa’s apartheid regime and establish a democratic system, including multiracial elections. In 1994, Mandela became the first President of South Africa to be democratically elected to the position.
In 1996, Nelson Mandela created the “Truth and Reconciliation Commission,” dedicated to investigating human rights infringements committed between 1960 and 1994, and restoring the dignity of those victim to these abuses. Mandela also started the Nelson Mandela Foundation, a charitable organization dedicated to alleviating poverty and stemming the HIV/AIDS pandemic rampant in South Africa at the time .
Mandela, along with former President de Klerk, received the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize for his work in eradicating apartheid.
He withdrew from the political world in March of 1999, but continued his philanthropic works. In 2001, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and went on to receive successful radiation treatment.
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Langston Hughes
Langston Hughes’ first novel, Not Without Laughter, was awarded the Harmon Gold Medal for literature in 1930. Hughes became the voice of the Harlem Renaissance, telling stories of black America through poems, memoirs, and other bodies of work.
Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, in 1902. After the separation of his parents, he lived with his biological grandmother for a few years before moving to Lincoln, Illinois to live with his mother. Eventually they moved to Cleveland, where he attended high school and was introduced to the beautiful poetry of Walt Whitman, which would inspire his later works.
After graduating high school in 1920, Hughes went on to attend Columbia University, but would drop out a year later to travel to West Africa as a crewman aboard a ship. He went on to complete his education in 1926, after the publication of his first book of poetry, The Weary Blues.
In May of 1967, Langston Hughes passed away from complications from prostate cancer surgery.
Colin Powell
Former US Secretary of State and retired four-star General Colin Powell was born in 1937 in Harlem. While attending City College of New York, Powell joined the ROTC, which began an illustrious thirty-five year career as a professional soldier.
From 1962-1963, Powell, then a Captain, served a tour in the Vietnam War as a South Vietnamese Army Advisor. After his return to the United States, Powell worked under President Nixon as part of a prestigious White House Fellowship. He was appointed to Secretary of State in 2000, following positions as Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor and an appointment as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Elevated PSA levels lead Powell’s doctor to perform several biopsies before diagnosing his prostate cancer in 2003. Powell, after reviewing his options, opted to have surgery to remove the cancer.
Since his successful surgery, Powell has been an advocate for early detection screenings and regular prostate examination. Hopefully his advocacy has improved early detection rates and helped other men detect survive prostate cancer.
Eli Whitney
American inventor Eli Whitney was born in Massachusetts in 1765. He attended Yale in 1789, and took a job as a private tutor after his graduation in 1792.
On his way to his position in South Carolina, Whitney accepted an invitation to visit General Nathanael Greene’s Georgia plantation, Mulberry Grove. It was at Mulberry Grove where Whitney invented the machine responsible for the start of the Industrial Revolution – and the start of the Civil War.
Whitney’s cotton gin turned cotton into a profitable crop by dramatically decreasing the time spent separating cotton fibers from its seeds. Unfortunately, this decrease in work lead to an increase in the demand for land, cotton growers, and cotton pickers. This demand was filled by an increase in slavery. By the 1850s, the number of slaves in the United States had more than quadrupled from the number in the 1790s.
In 1798, Eli Whitney received a contract from the United States government to manufacture muskets. This contract lead him to promote the idea of using interchangeable parts to produce muskets. Whitney was also credited with inventing the first milling machine in the early 1800s.
Whitney lived to be 60 years old. In 1825 Eli Whitney passed away from prostate cancer.
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Conclusion
Like the strong men listed above, you are so much more than your cancer.
Often, when shopping for life insurance, it’s tough to get underwriters to see you as more than your risk class.
We can help.
We know that you are not represented solely by the numbers of your Gleason score or the results of your PSA test. You are a human being comprised of many interests, hobbies, thoughts and feelings.
We are able to successfully find our clients the best insurance policies on the market because we force underwriters to look at you as a human, first, instead of a risk class.
Let us help you find the right insurance policy for you and your family.