WASHINGTON, April 29 — Tony Snow, press secretary to President Bush, has a message for people with cancer: “Don’t think about dying. Think about living.”
It is a snappy sound bite from a man accustomed to delivering them, but in this case, there is added poignancy to it. Last month, Mr. Snow learned that his colon cancer had recurred and spread to his liver.
On Monday, after a five-week absence, Mr. Snow will return to work at the White House. He intends to carry on the business of speaking for the president while undergoing chemotherapy.
Mr. Snow will not be the first high-profile political figure to undergo cancer treatment while in the spotlight. Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, led two contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearings in 2005 and spent much of that year in chemotherapy for Hodgkin’s disease. Elizabeth Edwards, wife of the Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards, continues to campaign with her husband even though her recurrent breast cancer, like Mr. Snow’s illness, is seen as treatable but not curable.
But Mr. Snow, 51, a former radio and television host for Fox News, has something the others do not: a lectern with the presidential seal behind it, and television cameras trained on him nearly every day. He said he intended to use that platform to give other cancer patients hope and to educate the public.
“Cancer frightens so many people that they don’t realize the treatment for the disease and the prognosis and the pace of innovation is so much different than we experienced when we were kids,” Mr. Snow said Friday. “There are folks out there who, they hear the word ‘cancer’ and they freak out, and they don’t need to do that anymore.”
Though Mr. Snow said he did not want to talk about the details of his treatment or his prognosis, his aim — as it is for all whose cancer cannot be cured — is to turn what appears to be a terminal condition into a chronic disease. He has spent the past five weeks recovering from exploratory surgery in which doctors removed some small tumors and found others.
The chemotherapy begins a week from Monday. Mr. Snow said he planned to have intensive treatments for four months, then go on maintenance doses.
Mr. Snow said he had spent nearly his entire adult life haunted by colon cancer. His mother died of the disease when he was 17. Though he said he was screened every two to three months, in 2005 he received a diagnosis of Stage III colon cancer, meaning the disease had spread to the lymph nodes but not to other organs. At that time, he underwent surgery to have his entire colon removed.
Experts say the discovery that the disease has spread means Mr. Snow has Stage IV colon cancer, the most advanced. About 60 percent of Stage III colon cancer patients survive five years after initial treatment, but experts say there are no reliable statistics on patients whose colon cancer has recurred.
On Friday, Mr. Snow said the recurrence “was harder for my family than for me” and had not caused him the kind of emotional upheaval people might expect.
“Keep in mind, I’ve been here before,” Mr. Snow said. “The most emotional part of this has not been getting a diagnosis, but just how nice people have been.”
