When you settle down on Sunday to watch hours--and we mean hours of Superbowl coverage--.and you’re drinking your soft drinks and your beer, does an enlarged prostate force many of you into deciding whether to stay for the next play or missing it because you just gotta go?

Former Superbowl quarterback Joe Theismann will tell you, you’re not alone.

Now, when you think of Joe Theismann and health, if you’re any kind of football fan, what comes to mind is the Lawrence Taylor tackle that broke Theismann’s leg.

The leg healed fine and today, Joe still has the arm.

But at 57, even though he’s in great shape, an enlarged prostate was not something joe could anything to prevent.

“My work was being hampered was being saddled because I had to make sure I knew how close I was to a bathroom,” says Theismann. “Is it a 30 second commercial; is it a 60 sec commercial? How much liquid am I going to drink within a course of a game?”

Some of the most common problems is waking up and having to go in the middle of the night, having to go frequently and having a stream that is just not what it used to be.

Those were Joe’s symptoms, and like a lot of guys, he was, at first, just suffering with it.

“I didn’t know there was something out there that gave me a quality of life. It is one thing to take something that makes you feel better; it’s another thing to actually take a product that actually shrinks the prostate,” Theismann recalls.

And there are several drugs on the market today that will shrink the prostate. “The drug I took, avadart, worked for me in about 6 weeks. What I started noticing is that I was not getting up in the middle of the night; I didn’t have the urge to go to the bathroom. I could sit and do 3 hours of a football game and feel relaxed and comfortable not wondering when that moment was going to hit me,” Theismann states.

Joe’s message: don’t be embarrassed about this; go to your doctor. “Oh you whisper, shhh, don’t talk about it too loud, someone might hear you. I come out of the macho-est world I think you could find in the world of sports. I hope that guys are looking at it and saying, “Hey, if Joe Theismann, whoever he is that world that he came out of, can sit down and talk about that problem. I should have the courage to ask a doctor in the privacy of his office and ask questions and be proactive about what is happening in my life.”

The man still got game!

Even though these medicines do block the effects of testosterone, there are little or no side effects such as impotence to be concerned about.

Joe says, he still does just fine, thank you.

Related Stories

 - Detached_Retina
 - WEEKLY HEALTH WRAP
 - Eye Diseases Are Rising Amongst the Elderly, But Few See Risk