How Healthy Is John McCain?

[EV_Ares]

It was the size of a dime and as thick as a nickel—a discolored blotch on John McCain's left temple. He didn't pay it much mind during the heat of the 2000 Republican primary campaign. But after losing the nomination to George W. Bush, the Arizona Senator found himself with time to spare. So as Bush celebrated victory, McCain headed to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., to have the spot checked out.

Less than three weeks later, McCain endured 5½ hours of surgery to remove a patch of skin including the blemish, roughly 5 cm (2 in.) wide. The diagnosis: Stage 2A melanoma, an invasive form of skin cancer that claims the lives of up to 34% of those diagnosed within 10 years. Doctors also made an incision down his left cheek to remove lymph nodes in his neck in case the cancer had spread; they found it had not. The surgery left a large scar, and for weeks McCain retreated from public view to recover.

Losing the G.O.P. nomination in 2000 gave McCain time to catch and treat the cancer at an early stage, which possibly saved his life. "If it was left alone, the risk was high that that melanoma would not just have become thicker but would also almost certainly have spread to the lymph nodes," says Dr. Jeffrey Lee, a cancer physician at the M.D. Anderson Cancer Center, who did not participate in McCain's care. "And the assumption would be that could occur within a period of a few months, if it hadn't happened already."

Eight years later, McCain at 71 finds himself on his way to another Republican Convention, and the questions about his health are no longer secondary to his political fortunes. If he were to win in November, he would become the oldest first-term President in U.S. history. To make the issue more pronounced, his likely opponent is young enough to be his son; at 46, Barack Obama hopes to become the fifth youngest President ever.

The sunburns that blistered McCain's skin as a child may prove far more of a threat to his longevity than his time as a prisoner. McCain's 2000 brush with melanoma wasn't his first and, experts say, may not be his last. He had a melanoma removed from his left shoulder in 1993 and had other noninvasive skin cancers removed from his upper left arm in 2000 and his nose in 2002. All were picked up and treated in the earliest stages of the disease, but because melanoma is one of the more unpredictable types of cancer, doctors say he remains at risk for not only spread from the excised cancers but new growths as well. "We know that there is a 40% risk of melanoma coming back with metastases even though the primary lesion is taken out," says Dr. Antoni Ribas, a cancer surgeon at UCLA Medical Center, who has not treated the Senator.

entire Time Mag Article @ link: http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1779596-2,00.html

[chemenger]

1. No commentary on the state of his mental health???

:shrug:

[wmbrew0206]

2. That should be in his medical records when they are released

The military does extensive evaluations on the mental health of POW when they return from captivity.

I suspect that McCain's psychological evaluations will not be helpful to his campaign.

[VP505]

3. That's what I want to hear about.

I think physically he is probably OK for a guy his age, but mentally, ummm, not so much. Unresolved PTSD issues might account for his explosive temper, that in my mind is more important than his physical health.