The Hilarious Thing About Testicular Cancer
Mortality, chemo, and if I’m ever murdered, they can use my silicone ball implant to identify my body.
Life was so stressful that when I found out I had cancer, the diagnosis was a relief—finally, I’d be forced to rest.
I wasn’t shocked. I had found a lump. My doctor warned me it was certainly cancer and would have to come out.
He was an older gay urologist who only examined me without gloves, patted my ass occasionally, and never charged me a copay. I wondered if that made me a kind of sex worker. I loved it.
I knew I was in a comedy and not a drama when I called my dad to tell him I had to have one of my testicles removed. He asked, “Well, how many testicles do you have right now?”
My mom cried and said something like, “You have cancer? How could you do this to me?”
My boyfriend, Steven, was steady after the initial shock. He didn’t say the words but I read on his face, Ew, that was in my mouth!
I didn’t die in surgery.
The testicle was positive for cancer, but it was contained and I wouldn’t need chemo.
My doctor had recommended a solid silicone testicle implant. The selling point was when he told me, “They all have serial numbers so if you’re murdered they can use it to identify your body.” That doctor really got me.
I let him pick the size. A mistake. He made a reasonable choice, so I missed my chance to go really huge.
The fake ball went in. My dead ball went to a landfill in Oxnard. Life kept going.
I waited to feel different, to see life differently. I didn’t.
Not yet.
I turned my broken heart (broken ball?) into art and made a web series about it called Last Will and Testicle.
I met other people who had survived. And learned about many who hadn’t. (Thinking of you, Max.)
I still didn’t understand my luck. Or the risk. A ballsack was still mostly a punchline.
Five years later, it came back. New tumor. New fear. Bad timing.
Steven and I were about to get engaged. We moved into our first house together in Palm Springs with our beloved dog, Tilda. My first book was about to come out and I was about to start a new career as an author. I had longer hair and somehow finally felt kinda cool.
The world was different, too. COVID arrived. I’d be getting chemo alone. No visitors. All the stakes felt higher.
I called my dad. “The cancer is in my lymph nodes this time, so I still have one testicle left if you want to update your records.”
The night before chemo was to start, I couldn’t sleep, snuck out of bed past Steven and Tilda. I sat on the sofa looking out the new backyard where we planned to build a life, crying and whispering to my tumor, “I don’t want this, I don’t want this.”
Chemo made me nauseous and hungry at the same time. My mouth tasted like chemicals and the fake berry flavoring of some of the meds. My hair started falling out. Steven helped me shave the back.
I was the youngest one in the infusion room, one of the only ones wearing a mask. A guy with only one leg watched Fox News during his entire infusion. A tough, stoic older woman knit and glared at me as I occasionally cried under my blanket.
One day she came over. I thought I was about to get gay bashed by a senior citizen with lymphoma.
“Do you like color?” she asked.
“Sure.”
She pulled a rainbow beanie from her tote. She had knitted it for me, for my bald head. This whole time, she saw me. I misread the real diagnosis, again.
Another afternoon, as Steven took me home from chemo, he slammed the brakes and yelled, “Was that a cat in the gutter?”
He ran into the street and came back with a kitten.
Steven was a great nurse to both of us, but we didn’t keep her. My immune system was too weak. Tilda was too sick. A friend helped re-home the kitten and named her Vanilla Bean.
Cancer didn’t make life stop. It just happened alongside everything else.
After chemo, doctors told me they needed to slice me open from neck to navel and remove the tumor and my bad lymph nodes.
I wanted a second opinion and Googled “best testicular cancer surgeon” and emailed all of them. One wrote back. He was nearby, at USC. He made a small, respectable incision. He charged a copay.
I’ve been cancer-free ever since.
My book came out.
Steven and I got married.
Vanilla Bean died.
Tilda died.
I’m still here. Funny.
When my young nieces hear that I survived testicular cancer they giggle. I get it. I tell them, “The body is a miracle.”
So is humor.
TL;DR
I treated testicular cancer like a joke.
It worked, until it didn't.
Humor doesn't say look away. It says look closer.
One More Thing
Hit “play” if you want a few more details, insights, and wild hand gestures, direct from me to you.
Next Time
I Was Really Brave Once in College. I Was Also Really Wrong.
Humiliation, fallout, and the small habit that still saves me when I’m spiraling.
That’s next week’s Byrontology.
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You might appreciate this, Byron. My husband bought a car at the end of the summer. He went to the registry to get a temporary plate, and when the DMV guy handed it to him, my husband said, "Are you kidding?" The plate was ONEBALZ. No lie.
I remember book signing across a concrete wall, cancer raging on both sides