The progression of testicular cancer and why I received radiation in my torso

The reason they zapped me on my midsection is, and this is important for people to know so they could ask their physicians, is because the way cancer travels from testicular cancer is through the lymph nodes. It starts—obviously testicular cancer—it starts somehow near or around the testicle. And then it would travel upwards. Famous biker Lance Armstrong, testicular cancer, stage 1 would be in the abdomen area, stage two would be in the lungs and the liver, stage three would be the lymph nodes in the neck, and stage 4 in the brain and hopefully it’s caught before that. Because cancer cells travel around your body through the blood system, through the lymph nodes, someone who’s cancer free may still have cancer in their blood or in their lymph nodes that might not actually be fully-developed cancer. It might be just the cancer cells.

There’s no piece of medical equipment today that can determine if somebody actually has cancer cells, unless it’s a full blown cancer, whether it’s leukemia lymphoma, testicular, liver cancer, something like that. So the reason they wanted to zap me in my midsection is because they knew, if there was any cancer cells, that the path is basically straight north. And so if there was one floating north, they would zap it and kill it now. Testicular cancer, specifically, has a very very high percentage of killing off—the testicular cancer cells get killed from the radiation. So radiation is very effective on testicular cancer. So they knew that by getting me in my midsection, that it would kill anything that was lurking about before it exploded into something else. So that’s why they got me in my midsection.

The reason they didn’t get me in the testicle, once again is, there was only one testicle left and because it’s less than a 1% chance that that testicle would become engulfed in a cancerous tumor, and we wanted to have children, they were fairly comfortable that that wasn’t going to happen.

When I talked about the watch list earlier, that they could just watch me, they would just follow up with blood tests, MRIs, CT scans, just to make sure that the other testicle did not get infected by the cancer and then that cancer cell explode later. So now, two-and-a-half years later, I’m sitting here with my testicle and no cancer traces in my body.