On #Movember and 6 Months Cancer Free
It’s #Movember — a month rebranded as one focused on men’s health issues and raising awareness for all things related to that, including testicular cancer. It feels fitting that I just celebrated being 6 months cancer free — a massive milestone not to be overlooked. It makes me incredibly happy to confidently say that I’m on the other side of cancer. There is no feeling more unsettling than waiting for the results of those first few scans post-op to ensure that everything is clean, so being able to take a deep breath is an incredible relief.
It feels like forever ago and yesterday simultaneously. In February of this year, I was diagnosed suddenly with testicular cancer (which I wrote about here). It was abrupt, traumatic and terrifying. It changed my life, but didn’t end my life — but that’s not to say that it couldn’t have.
I’m sure many people reading this are just like me: late 20’s or early 30’s, have never had a health scare in their life and usually try to go to the doctor for an annual checkup (but missing it wouldn’t be the end of the world). That was me, too. Maybe twice a year I’d come down with a cold, or face an occasional sports injury, but I was always care-free about my health and how I approached it. As a young, healthy 20-something I felt indestructible.
When I felt something unusual on my body, I almost took the nonchalant approach most generally healthy men in their late 20’s or 30’s would take — to just ignore it. It’ll go away. I’m healthy and everything is fine. Getting checked out is for the old! I can tough this out, it’s something that will just pass…
Well, that was clearly not the case with this one. If it wasn’t from some nudging from my fiancé, I probably would have taken that approach. What turned out to be stage one testicular cancer, a very curable instance of the disease, could have been a very different diagnosis had I delayed the process of getting checked out even marginally.
When I was diagnosed, most of my friends had absolutely no idea how common testicular cancer is for men of this particular age range. According to Johns Hopkins:
It is estimated that 8,000 to 10,000 men will develop testis cancer each year. The chance of developing testis cancer is about one in 270. Testis cancer is most common in men in their late 20s and early 30s, with an average age of diagnosis of 33 years old.
33! That’s not an age you think of as being the most common for something with the word “cancer” attached to it.
Again, I was fortunate. My position of health has given me a ton of gratitude. It has also created a sense of obligation to continue to drive the message home to GET CHECKED! Gents — if you’re watching a movie on the couch with your hand down your pants, give yourself a little self-checkup. Women do a great job talking openly about self-examining themselves for breast cancer — we should be the same way. And if you feel something abnormal, even if you think there’s a .0001% chance of it being anything noteworthy — go to the doctor. Those were the odds I would have given what I felt being testicular cancer, too…
And finally, in the spirit of #Movember— here’s a horrendous picture of me with a mustache (a preview of what’s to come later this month…?). I’ll end this post on that note. Get yourselves checked!
