Last April, my loitering hand came across a bump in the night. Hard, painless, irregular, and projecting out from the otherwise smooth surface of my right testicle, as a first-semester second-year medical student, I “knew” what it was, or thought I did. The resident at Family Medicine the next day didn’t feel anything, and dismissed my concern as a symptom of the well-known hypochondriacal Medical Student’s Disease (MSD). I was unconvinced, and demanded to see the radiologist, who likewise regaled me of stories of his own MSD lymphoma as he smeared my nether regions with cold gel and started smooshing around with the ultrasound transducer. At a certain point, his story became fragmented, hesitant, and then stopped altogether, as a frown crept across his face. There was no easy way to tell me. I had been right. It was a solid tumor. He walked me back over to Family Medicine in order to make up for his faux pas and to ensure that I got taken seriously on the other end. As he spoke with the attending in the hallway, the original resident peeked her head into the room, beamed a great big smile, and trying not to laugh, asked “So? What did the radiologist tell you?” – “That it’s a tumor” – “(snicker) No, really. It’s nothing, right?”
She got straightened out. I received lots of apologetic voicemails from her over the next few weeks, which I never returned. I had more important things to take care of.
To make a very long story very short, everything pretty much went peachy. After surreal trips to the sperm bank in West LA, much organizing, agonizing, and weasling, I got the first surgery out of the way within a week. I went on to finish up the school year (with a lot of help from my friends), flew up to the Bay and had the second surgery, a retroperitoneal lymph node dissection, done at UCSF at the beginning of June. I was back in school, placing ever-more complicated pieces of a laser-cut jigsaw puzzle of life together, when a routine CT reminded me that it was not normal to have developed a beer belly within the span of a couple of weeks.
And blammo! Suddenly everything, everything, everything, is up in the air.
1 comment:
dear josh,
thank you for writing the blog. i feel a little more connected to you and the journey you're on. as a writer who struggles, i can tell you your writing is gripping and the more vague stuff--the fanciful mind meandering--is not drivel. it's just a little less concrete than most of the drivel we write and read. i had a nice time with your parents last night. i hope it was okay for them. of course they're thinking about you all the time, but we gave them a teensy bit of distraction. i hope to come to see you before the week is out. much love,
your friend jan
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