BOISE -- Has your doctor ever asked you a question and maybe you've hemm'd and haw'd around a little bit before answering?
One answer from one question ended up saving one man's life.
Ed Milliken is a busy dad, and a happy one too. He has much to be thankful for like his kids and his health.
But if you knew Ed's life seven years ago, he had neither. That was about the time Ed had come to a Meridian facility to seek solutions for infertility problems.
He and his wife badly wanted to have kids, but what they didn't know was that their fight to have children would reveal another battle. Ed would have to take on another fight - this one to save his life.
It all started with a question from urologist Dr. John Greer. While looking at the infertility issue with Ed, Dr Greer had another question: Was anything else wrong?
Ed mention that he was having some urinary problems and having some changes because of it. "I was having some strange you know kind of symptoms. You know maybe needing to go to the bathroom more often than normal," said Ed.
That prompted the doctor to order a test not normally done during an infertility evaluation, a PSA blood test, which looks for prostate cancer.
Ed wasn't a likely candidate for that type of cancer. At 37, he was much too young.
"When you look at the demographics for prostate cancer, you see well less than one percent of the diagnosis made in men under age 40. And so it's probably closer to one in a thousand or one in ten thousand," says Dr. Greer
Ed ended up to be "that one." Ed actually had a very advanced, aggressive cancer.
It was so bad that Ed faced surgery that would make him infertile - just the problem he and his wife Dixie were trying to overcome.
They had decisions to make. Facing the possibility of death and the desire to have children, the couple made a choice they didn't regret.
They decided to bank Ed's sperm. Freezing it in the hope of eventually producing a child whether Ed lived or died.
"We actually came to the conclusion that regardless of what happened to me, we were going to go ahead and try and I thought what a great legacy to leave some children behind If I didn't make it from the cancer," said Ed.
So they forged ahead. Ed with cancer treatment, his wife Dixie following later with treatment to get pregnant. There were disappointments.
Ed says, "We went the invitro route. Yeah, we had 3 failed attempts."
"We were getting to the end of maybe this wasn't suppose to happen and then wah-law," Dixie says.
"Yeah, they said yeah you're definitely pregnant and you're a lot pregnant," remembers Ed.
The Milliken's ended up having twins. That was seven years ago, now looking back, without that fight to have these kids, Ed would have never known he had prostate cancer.
A double blessing for this Boise father, "Yea, they are beautiful."
Today, Ed is considered cancer free and he would be the first to tell men, go get checked for prostate cancer.
That screening is recommended yearly for men starting at age 50.
