A well-known travel writer takes an unexpected journey

It was supposed to be a routine doctor’s appointment. 

Well-known travel writer and TV host Rick Steves, 69, was sitting across from his new primary-care doctor at UW Medicine, who suggested a wellness checkup, a few dietary tweaks, maybe tai chi? And how about a blood test? 

Steves agreed and didn’t think more about it. He went back to work planning a TV shoot about barge trips in Burgundy.

“A few days later, my doctor calls me and asks if there is a quiet place to sit down,” Steves remembered. “He then told me my PSAs were off the charts.”

Cells in the prostate gland make a protein called prostate-specific antigen, or PSA. A blood test can measure the PSA circulating in the blood, with a high count sometimes indicating prostate cancer. The normal PSA for someone Steves’ age is less than 4 nanograms per milliliter, according to his urologic oncologist and surgeon, Dr. Daniel Lin, a Fred Hutch Cancer Center physician and chief of UW Medicine’s urologic oncology program. 

Steves’ PSA level was 55. 

“It was like I’d been thrown into a new land fraught with mystery and uncertainty,” he wrote in an Oct. 8 post on Facebook. “Suddenly swept away from my general practitioner and into the world of oncology, I needed to make important decisions about things I knew nothing of, and I barely spoke the language.”

Lin presented his initial treatment options: radiation treatment or surgery to remove the prostate. Steves chose robotic radical prostatectomy and underwent the procedure in October. Steves’ journey started at Fred Hutch South Lake Union Clinic for diagnostic tests and overall treatment coordination. His surgery took place at the University of Washington Medical Center-Montlake. Fortunately, the battery of tests did not show evidence that his cancer had spread beyond the prostate. 

Steves hadn’t been admitted to a hospital since getting dental care as a college student at the UW in the 1970s. Even traveling all around the world for 50 years, he’d never been overnight at a hospital until his surgery this fall. 

The day of the surgery was emotional, he said.

“Oh baby, it was scary. It was thrilling. It was like, here we go,” he said. “It's like pushing yourself off of a very high slide in a waterpark, and there's water gushing all around you, and you reassure yourself that ‘people do this, and I'm going to come out at the other end,’ but buckle up.”

On the day of the surgery, he was up at 4:30 a.m., to the hospital, gowned up and rolled on a gurney into the operating room, he posted on Facebook.

On entering the operating room, he said it was “reassuringly filled with an awe-inspiring mix of masked-up experts, technology, sterility, and humanity.”

He woke up to good news. The surgery went well. 

Steves has shared his journey on his Facebook and X accounts, and The New York Times, Washington Post, Seattle Times, People Magazine and CNN have followed his story. 

He’s amazed by all the fuss. 

As a lifelong traveler, Steves appreciated the care teams at Fred Hutch and UW Medicine in his cancer journey.

“Dr. Lin is great, absolutely great,” Steves said. “He calmed me. He communicates well.”

He praised the seamless work between both organizations.  

“I realized you can be oblivious to all that’s going on with medicine and hospitals when you're in a stage of your life where you hardly ever go to the doctor, and then, when it’s your turn to need it, you realize there are a lot of smart and dedicated people who spend a lot of time on these different campuses, and it's evolving, and it's something that is a huge blessing for us,” he said.

Lin returned the admiration.

“Given the cards he’s been dealt, he’s been amazingly positive,” Lin said. “He’s incredibly detail-oriented and wants to be more informed than most patients. He wants to address things head-on and has a remarkable, proactive attitude.”

By being forthcoming about his own health, Steves hopes to give others hope for facing cancer or any of life’s other steep challenges. 

He also shared that, as a child, he had watched his mother try to manage depression. 

“They were trying to find the right drug to get her out of her mental state and back on track,” he remembered. “But no one wanted to talk about it.”

“I feel like we need to share our realities with each other,” he said. 

Steves is also grateful that his prostate cancer didn’t emerge 30 years ago, before robotic surgery came on the scene. 

“I’ve got friends who’ve shown me their prostate cancer scar, and it looks like you were on a pirate ship or something,” he said. “I’ve just got little holes where the robotics went in.”

Lin encourages patients to talk with their doctors about PSA screening and not be deterred by fear or shyness. Catching cancer early gives patients the best chance at successful treatment, and life beyond. He suggests that men between ages 50 and 70 consider a screening at least every two to four years, but some people may have higher risks due to genetic factors and family history of prostate cancer. 

Steves’ sharing of his journey has brought an outpouring of fan response. His Facebook page has had over 1 million followers, and collectively his social media sites have logged 18,000 supportive comments.

Steves wants to use his celebrity status to encourage other men to talk with their doctors about a PSA test. “Don’t wait for symptoms,” he advised. 

“If you’re waiting for symptoms, you’ve got a bad game plan,” he said. 

“Know your family history,” he added. After his surgery, Steves said he learned that at the same age he is now, both his uncle and grandfather had prostate cancer. 

Steves is grateful for the care he received, support from the public and his loved ones, and the fact he lives in the Pacific Northwest. 

He now considers his journey as “the road to recovery.”

“Buckling myself gingerly into the passenger seat," he wrote on Facebook. “I was overcome with thankfulness: that I live in a corner of the world where hospitals aren’t being bombed or flooded... and that I have access to a brilliant UW Medicine surgeon and the best tech anywhere at Seattle’s Fred Hutch Cancer Center.”

Fred Hutch is an independent organization that also serves as the cancer program for UW Medicine. 

Download broadcast-ready soundbites and related multimedia with Steves.

For details about UW Medicine, please visit http://uwmedicine.org/about.