A day after being re-elected to his seat of New England, the Nationals deputy leader, Barnaby Joyce, announced he has been diagnosed with prostate cancer and will undergo surgery on Monday.
The former deputy prime minister, 58, told the ABC he had not experienced any symptoms, but that his doctor had recommended he take a prostate-specific antigen (PSA) blood test.
After the test returned “elevated” results, he had an MRI and biopsy, which confirmed the diagnosis.
Prostate cancer is the most common form of cancer in men, with one in eight diagnosed with the disease during their lifetime.
Joyce told the ABC he felt “very blessed and lucky” to have discovered the cancer early, and that he expected to make a full recovery.
“Prostate cancer, if you get it early, is very, very treatable; in fact, about 97 per cent successful”, he said, urging all men to watch for symptoms and take the PSA test to detect early signs of the disease.
“After a short period in hospital, I’ll take a break to recover before getting back to work,” he told Australian Community Media.
He said he kept his diagnosis private during the election campaign as he “didn’t want it to be a distraction.”
Joyce said he will have surgery on Monday, after which he was under strict instructions from family to rest after the surgery.
“My wife has told me I’m not allowed to go into the paddock, no fencing, no ducking out to the paddock to do a bit of cattle work,” he told ACM.
Joyce was comfortably returned for a fifth term as the member for New England in Saturday’s poll, receiving 67.5% of the two-party-preferred vote – a 2% swing.
Nationals MPs broadly did not see as fierce swings as their Liberal counterparts, though the party looked likely to lose its deputy leader, Perin Davey, from the Senate, and failed to regain Calare in NSW from National turned independent MP Andrew Gee.
