Bret Hart On If He's Cancer Free Now, Importance Of Early Detection, How He's Feeling After Surgery

- WWE Hall of Famer Bret Hart recently spoke with WWE's website about his prostate cancer battle. The full interview is at this link. Below are highlights:

How he's feeling after surgery:

I'm actually feeling pretty good. I'm still a little sore in the abdominal area where I have five puncture holes about the size of a pencil in my stomach that make it hard to sit up. The incision they made was pretty small, only an inch-and-a-half to two inches long. For the most part, as compared to other surgeries, you can get back on your feet pretty quick. I got the thumbs?up from my doctor that I should have a smooth and steady recovery for the next few months. I won't be running any mountains, and I can't lift anything over 10 pounds. All I can do is sit around. Thank God for WWE Network. I've been watching a lot of it.

A message for readers:

Ultimately, I'm hoping that my voice may cause men to get checked and save some lives in the years ahead. There are no symptoms of prostate cancer. If I hadn't been getting checked on a regular basis, I wouldn't have known. That's where men make the mistake. They say, "I feel good, so I'm not going to get checked." If it happened to a healthy guy like me, who is physically fit and whose dad lived to be 90, it can happen to anybody. It's easy to get checked with simple blood work. All men in their 50s, or even 40s and younger, should get checked. Prostate cancer can manifest and then grow for years without you knowing it. By the time you do get checked, it's too late and it could spread all over to the rest of your body. Early detection of prostate cancer can result in being completely cured. If you get it early, they can remove it and you can live a normal life.

If he's cancer free now:

Well, there's always a chance it could come back, but it seems my cancer was contained within my prostate. I have to get checked every three months for the next couple of years, and eventually it will be once a year, and eventually, in 10 years, they'll tell me that I'm cancer-free forever.

Check out the full interview with Bret at this link.