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A doctor suggested surgery. Grove continued reading. "If this wasn't your life here," his wife said to him one morning as he pored over charts, "I'd say you were having fun." Well, Grove was kind of having fun--his scientific mind was engaged by the prostate-cancer research. A second doctor offered another opinion: radiation-seed therapy. Grove kept reading. "You know," says Eva, "I was surprised by how he reacted to the disease. Normally he's a baby. Anytime someone has a headache, he's saying, 'Oh, it's cancer.' But this time it really was cancer. He was tough." A third doctor, a third opinion: the best solution is to watch and wait. Grove listened to them all and then picked the course he's chosen for years. "I bet on my own charts."
Grove bet his life on a "smart bomb" of high-dose radiation, a new procedure that he felt offered the best chances. It seems to have put the cancer away for now. Grove won't say he's "recovered," just that levels of the telltale prostate-specific antigen (PSA) in his blood have sunk.
The cancer, he insists, hasn't changed him. But it has changed his life. Eating with Grove most days is like a trip to a vegan commune--tofu, veggies, five servings of fruit a day, a palmful of antioxidant pills. He continues to dig through prostate-cancer research and sits on the board of CapCure, Michael Milken's prostate-cancer foundation. Last spring Grove uncovered a yet-to-be published study showing a link between calcium intake and the spread of prostate cancer to the rest of the body. He rushed to the CapCure doctors and persuaded them to reduce a longstanding recommendation to take calcium supplements. Who could argue with a man who was betting his life?
He has PSA tests every four months now. "It's an unusual thing. Most cancers don't have scorecards," he says. "But here you go and give blood, and a day later, they tell you the rest of your life basically." Andy Grove, face to face with death three times a year. Surely he must love this. "I worry about it the last month of the four. It's not logical, but it's very observable and real. When I enter the month of the test, my stress notches up. And then as I get closer, I get more nervous. And then when they draw the blood, it's unimaginable--a new level of anxiety starts, and it continues until I get my results back." The tests, so far, have yielded only one surprise: Andy Grove isn't bloodless after all.
His children could have told you that years ago. Grove has always been fully flushed with fatherhood. "He was a wonderful father," recalls his older daughter. Says his younger: "Being Andy Grove's child isn't for the faint of heart. But if you can roll with it, it's great." Case in point: Grove always worked to include the kids in his business travel. But he made the girls write reports on the countries they were visiting: Italy, Spain, England. A nickel a page. "That's how we'd get our spending money," recalls a daughter. "Luckily, my grandparents would kick in a little more." Grove's parents moved to the U.S. in 1965. His father died in 1987; his mother lives in California.