Bollocks

It all started what turned out to be a silly amount of time ago in a land far, far away. I was in my bedroom in Melbourne, lying on my bed. Absent-mindedly I reached down to my balls, had a feel. It’s what we do. Men, I mean. It’s what men do.

But I gradually became aware of what I was doing. Suddenly it gained importance. Suddenly it required my full attention. Something was different. The left one felt different. Or was I imagining it? I paid closer attention. It felt the right shape, and there was the tube coming off it. Yes, that seems okay. I’m imagining it.

It had always been the ‘weird’ one. I was born prematurely and with an undescended testicle. I had two operations before I was 10 to rectify this state of affairs and so I was always aware that this one wasn’t quite the same as the other one. Really, it was only a bit smaller and later discreet (and not so discreet) investigation of other men revealed this to be the usual.

But it continued to change. It changed so gradually that it was, for a long time, hard to tell if I wasn’t imagining it. The clues began to fall into place, however, increasingly hard to ignore. There was an occasional ache in that ball, something I initially put down to not having ejaculated for a few days. I wasn’t comfortable with my boyfriend touching my balls, something I put down to my general ‘sensitivity’ at being touched. But it soon became that particular ball. We started calling it the grumpy one.

Soon it was the same size as the other one, but nothing like the same shape. And it was getting hard. Occasionally the word cancer would fleetingly float through my brain and just as quickly drift off. It seemed like a ridiculous concept in relation to me. At that point I didn’t know how common testicular cancer was amongst men born with an undescended testicle. My father’s experience with testicular cancer some two, three years ago didn’t come into the equation either. He was an old man compared to me. I wasn’t due anything like this for a long time. Or so I thought.

I wasn’t really in a position to do anything about it either, really. When I first noticed it I was in Australia, and while they give reciprocal health care to British citizens I didn’t take the changes in my testicle seriously enough at that time. By the time it was starting to clamour for my attention and getting a bit ‘grumpy’ I was in Thailand, a country where medical attention for foreigners is costly and, worse, unpredictable in quality.

A female friend of mine had the unfortunate experience of having to have an abortion in a Thai hospital. They did it under local anaesthetic and she could feel the doctor going in and the … pain … was unbearable. With this in mind the idea of getting my bits checked out in that country held little appeal. But it quickly became clear that I wasn’t going to be in Thailand for any length of time and so it went on the list of things to do when I got home.