Ben Stiller revealed this week that he was diagnosed with prostate cancer two years ago. The 50-year-old actor made the announcement on The Howard Stern Show on Tuesday that he was diagnosed with "immediately aggressive" prostate cancer when he was 48.

"At first, I didn't know what was gonna happen," Stiller said. "I was scared. It just stopped everything in your life because you can't plan for a movie because you don't know what's gonna happen."

Opening up about his cancer for the first time, Stiller said he had been getting a PSA blood test for a number of years, and when his doctors saw his test numbers rise, he visited a urologist, received an MRI and a biopsy, and was told he had cancer.

"It came out of the blue for me," Stiller said. "I had no idea."

With no history of prostate cancer in his family, Stiller called his Meet the Parents co-star Robert De Niro, who beat prostate cancer a few years ago.

"The first thing I did when I got diagnosed was get on the internet to try to learn," Stiller said. "I saw De Niro had had it. I called him right away."

Stiller, after visiting a few doctors, received "robotic assisted laparoscopic radical prostatectomy," as he explains in a Medium essay, which removed all the cancer. He's now been cancer free for two years.

"What I had — and I'm healthy today because of it — was a thoughtful internist who felt like I was around the age to start checking my PSA level, and discussed it with me," Stiller wrote. "If he had waited, as the American Cancer Society recommends, until I was 50, I would not have known I had a growing tumor until two years after I got treated. If he had followed the US Preventive Services Task Force guidelines, I would have never gotten tested at all, and not have known I had cancer until it was way too late to treat successfully."

Now "100 percent" free of cancer, Stiller told Stern that even before his diagnosis, he was "creating the whole movie in my head. I'm picturing the funeral."

From: Esquire US