Colin McFarlane, a British actor, has disclosed that he has prostate cancer in its early stages.
The 61-year-old actor, who is best known for his part in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight trilogy, spoke publicly about his illness following testing in December.
The single father expressed his gratitude to doctors for being able to detect the disease early as he underwent routine testing for it during the previous eight years.
According to Colin, who spoke with The Mirror, 1 in 4 Black males are in danger of developing the disease, which claims the lives of 12,000 men per year and increases a man’s likelihood of developing prostate cancer by 2.5 times if his father or brother has already had it.
In addition, the BBC Not Going Out actor urged his two brothers to get checked; one of them later learned that he, too, had prostate cancer.
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Colin told the publication: “My dad is benign but he had an operation in 1999 and he said to me, ‘oh, I decided not to tell you and your brothers because I didn’t want to worry you’.
“He had no awareness of the fact that, actually, it was really important that he told us because there’s a genetic link.”
The earliest stage of cancer, T1 out of five categories, implies that Colin is at “very low risk” and does not yet require treatment, according to the experts who diagnosed him.
He said: “You think, well, there’s a 70% chance that I’m OK. They said ‘We will just give you a blood test’, the same blood test that highlighted this. ‘We will now do that as a prostate-specific antigen test every three months.’ And then once a year, I’ll have an MRI.”
Colin continued by stressing the significance of men talking about prostate cancer rather than “waiting for symptoms,” which may indicate the illness has spread.
He said that early detection of the cancer makes it “treatable and curable.”
Along with his wife Kate and son Josh, Colin splits his time between Lincoln and London.
