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The results are in and a very nice man rang me today to tell me what tests on my erstwhile bollock had revealed.
Like a regular Simon Cowell he kept the tension up by first of all asking me about my recovery and how things were going since the operation, but then hit me with the news. I am not going to play the same trick and will reassure you at this point hat it sounds bad, but it turns out it’s probably not that bad.
Because perhaps unsurprisingly this was cancer.
Having said that I was still surprised.
I’ve been trying to be positive throughout all this (whilst being realistic) and it seemed more than possible to me that something else was going on. There is no testicular cancer in my family, my balls descended properly in my childhood and I am even a little bit older than most men who suffer from this (don’t want to show off about my super young bollocks, but the facts speak for themselves). Also though beyond having an over sized bollock there was no other indication of illness. So I’d sort of convinced myself they’d come back and tell me it was just a very big sperm or a tiny submarine crewed by Raquel Welch.
In some ways it would be more annoying to find out there was nothing wrong. Sorry, it wasn’t cancer, it was a smudge on the scanning machine.
Can you put the bollock back in then?
Um….
BUT though cancer sounds like bad news, apart from that bit it’s pretty much all good news. The bad stuff was all safely ensconced inside my ball like the hazelnut in the middle of a Ferrero Rocher (I am not going to promise my wife a pyramid of exponential bollocks) and has not spread, so it’s all out. Testicular cancer has a 99% survival rate (I wish someone had told me this right at the start) and you can increase that to practically 100% if you wish by having one shot of chemo (which stops it coming back in your nodes) and obviously the fantastic NHS will be keeping an eye on me from now on. The doctor on the phone was extremely positive and reassuring. I am going to see an oncologist next week to discuss my options, but essentially it seems that I should be around for a good while yet.
How unlucky was I to get a fairly rare cancer without exhibiting any of the usual causes? But then how lucky was I to get the one that is basically curable? And that they’re already basically cured.
The lesson is that if you find anything weird with your balls (or boobs - and by they way guys, Paxman told me that breast cancer is much more common in men than testicular cancer, so check your boobs too). The danger from testicular cancer comes from ignoring it or not noticing it in the first place, so thank God I only delayed by a few days before getting in touch with my GP and thank God he still sent me in to be scanned even though he was fairly certain it was nothing to worry about. I don’t know how long the cancer had been secretly creeping deep inside (to quote my donkey birthday song that my mum thinks I should now change the lyrics to, but which I won’t) or if I missed the chance to spot this earlier, but luckily it doesn’t seem like that has put me in any more jeopardy.
Hey look, this is definitely a wake up call and I am very far from thinking Hooray - everything is OK and I haven’t learned a thing. Something different may come along or I might get hit by a bus or I might be the 1% of unlucky fuckers who doesn’t get to recover.
But for the moment I am just relieved that I dodged the bullet (or that it just nipped my nutsack). It’s sad to lose a gonad in a gun fight, but you can’t really complain when you look at all the people who got shot in the head.
Because all my family have lived into old age (one grandad only got to 78, but he had been a smoker and my other grandparents got to 81, 91 and 102) I have always sort of assumed I’d get to 75 at least, but none of us should make assumptions and though I don’t think there’s any way of knowing what caused Norris McSquirter to attempt to murder me, having a more consistently healthy lifestyle can’t hurt.
Whatever I get is pretty much some free extra time when you think about it. I am sure I will waste plenty of that time, but I will do my best to make the most of the bits where I am not playing games on my phone in the bath.
