How I felt when I was diagnosed with testicular cancer

It was a complete numbing feeling. I was; it was 11:14 am. I looked at the clock and the doctor told me, he asked me if I knew who Lance Armstrong was and right away I knew this wasn’t good. So it was a complete numbing feeling. I went back to work, got in my car, went immediately to pick up Elana in Skokie, where she’s working, and just broke down and started bawling. We didn’t know what stage it was, we didn’t know how bad it was, we didn’t know how long it was there. At 2:15 the doctor called and confirmed that it was cancer and said, "it’s a 99% chance that it is cancer. I have you scheduled for emergency surgery tomorrow morning at 7:30, so you need to be there at 6:30", which turned out to be about 5:45, quite early in the morning. And he said since it is only a 99% chance, it’s still 1% chance it could just be a cyst, so you have a choice if you want to have the surgery or not. And I said at 99% chance I will see you tomorrow morning at 6:30 in the morning. So we really didn’t have much time. There wasn’t any alternative as far as I was concerned. I didn’t know how bad it was going to be and I knew that because it was testicular cancer, it wasn’t going to be fun but it had to be done, and it was one of the best of the worst in terms of survival rate. I made the decision to have the surgery and it was just a numbing feeling after that. It was very surreal. I’ve always been healthy, I’ve always been active, working out, always followed the rules, I was not a smoker, didn’t eat the wrong foods most of the time, I’m not a drinker, never did drugs. I’ve done marathons and other triathlons and when I found out I had cancer I just, it was just a complete numbing feeling. It was out of the body experience for 15, 16 hours. When we got home that night, after we told our friends and family, it was just Elana and I and neither of us knew what to do. We’d never faced cancer personally within ourselves. We’ve always heard people are sick, people get cancer. We didn’t have any answers. We didn’t have anybody really to talk to at this point. Our friends were very supportive. I didn’t know if this was stage 4 and the doctor was going to tell me 6 months to live or if he was just going to say ok we took the little part out and you’re fine and just go home and now go do your triathlons and marathons and have a good life and by the way the sperm will come back. We didn’t know any answer. We didn’t know what was going to happen. We just knew that cancer is now part of our lives the rest of our lives. The hardest thing in the world to say at 2:33 in the morning when Elana and I were up trying to figure out where our life is going I said if anything happens to me just pay off the house. It’s the hardest thing to ever say to someone you love.