Well, I haven’t done a real update in a while, but this time it’s not because my life is boring…
So on Friday February 1 I go to the Doctor because I had noticed a small lump on my testicle a couple of weeks early, I didn’t really think that much about it other than I should get it checked out. My appointment with the Doctor is first thing in the morning, he takes a look at it and says I need to go see a specialist that same day. I was working that day so I have to leave work and go to this specialist. He says that I need to get an ultrasound as soon as possible and gives me 50/50 odds that it will have to come out. Now right after hearing that I have to go back to work, which as you can imagine was more than a little difficult…
Monday morning rolls around and I go into the hospital for an ultrasound. Now this is very uncomfortable for me. I have this female technician handling my boys checking them for solid masses. She checks the left one (non-lump one) first and keeps saying things like “that looks good” and “that’s fine”. She then starts to check the right one and gets oddly quiet. I know something is seriously wrong at this point. She finishes up and says I can go and that I will hear from my doctor in about two days.
I make the drive home and make it up to my bedroom and I get a phone call from my doctor. The radiologist had called him right after I left. I go into his office and he basically tells me it’s gotta come out. They give me some forms and I go back to the hospital for the second time that day and get a chest x-ray as well as give them some of my blood to take a look at. Thursday I’m going in for surgery.
It all happened so fast that I didn’t even have time to process everything. Before I knew it thursday came and into the hospital I go. They take out one of my little friends and send me home that night. I now have a rocking scar right below my waist where they cut me open to take out my boy. Of course I have to start moving on sunday, so I have a pretty chaotic week ahead of me.
Tuesday I have to go back to the hospital to get a CT scan. They make me drink three glasses of water with some type of contrast dye in it, hook me up to an IV and shoot more dye through my veins and run me back and forth through a machine to scan my insides. By the way, when they shoot the dye through your veins it’s warm and you feel like you peed your pants.
The next tuesday (Feb. 19) I go back to the doctor and he tells me that my x-ray, blood tests, and CT scans didn’t show anything but he hasn’t gotten the pathology report back from the hospital that would say exactly what was in my testicle that they took out. I go to school and get a phone call from him a few hours later. He tells me that it was cancer, and that it was an embryonal carcinoma and that I will have to follow up with the BC Cancer Agency for any further treatment.
Yesterday I finally got my appointment with the BC Cancer Agency. So March 5 I will finally have some idea what will happen next with me. The anxiety over this is worse than anything else…
If you want to know a little more, the BC Cancer Agency web page has some information on testicular cancer here:
http://www.bccancer.bc.ca/PPI/TypesofCancer/Testes/default.htm