I remember in eighth grade we had to watch a video concerning testicular cancer, and it was the hokiest thing ever. Showed this kid in the shower from the chest up. He reaches his arms down and starts...well I don't really know what he does, but he gets a big smile on his face, which gradually changes to one of pure confusion, and finally with a slight frown.
The next scene is him walking through his living room, with his dad sitting in a recliner reading the paper. I can't say for certain that the dad was smoking a pipe and had thick-rimmed glasses on, but let's just assume he did since everyone was dressed like something out of the fifties anyway.
Quite non-chalantly he asks his son how he is. How did the sock hop go? Was it swell? Was the coach sore at you at basketball practice today? Old Man Mermin has a new flavor of ice cream down at the soda shoppe, maybe you and Josephine could go and have a nice malted.
The son - still wearing a look of perplexion - replies that things are ok, in a slightly nervous twitter. His dad says that's great. The son takes one step away, stops, and then turns back. "Dad," he says. "I found a lump."
Where, my boy?
"You know....on my nut."
We all burst out laughing, because could you really not expect eighth grade boys to laugh at that?
The dad pulled his boy close and said some encouraging words at this point. IMMEDIATELY, in an extremely quick cut, the next shot is a close-up of someone's balls, fingers rubbing them furiously as if they were trying to get ants off them.
A fairly horrifying experience.
At any rate, Tybee, I'll be cheering you on. I mean, you're essentially Hank Lance Hill Armstrong at this point, so I expect you to bike up mountains and talk about propane in every post you ever make from now on. I also fully expect you to take pictures of the excised testicle, which I imagine to be grapefruit sized.
A guy from my high school in my class died from cancer...roughly a year ago. It was an extremely depressing experience for me, primarily because I couldn't quite integrate it fully into my mind. He wasn't exactly a friend. I mean I knew who he was and he knew who I was and we even hung out once or twice, but he ran with a different group of people and such. I had kept a few tabs on him throughout the years and knew that he had been diagnosed sometime after high school.
I specifically remember him reading a story he had written for English class toward the end of senior year, which was basically a letter retelling his exploits at a track meet that he was a part of a few weeks before. I couldn't tell you why I remember this exact moment - high school is full of useless moments I'm trying to forget - but I completely and vividly have this one ingrained in my head.
I guess it's because...that's how I want to remember the guy. The story he told was kind of funny, had some great emotional sentimentality to it, but overall was about the cheerfulness and joy of life. After high school, I'd run into him occasionally since he hung out with my little sister's then-boyfriend.
Her bf used to make movies with his little camcorder of he and his friends. The guy with cancer was in them. The videos were like something you'd see off youtube - a big montage of all the moments between friends, overlayed with music. It was always so incredibly inspirational, as if it were convincing you that life was indeed worth living. Inspirational. That sort of thing.
It's probably why I felt so sad when the guy passed. He went to the then-bf's wedding, which was the last time I saw him. He was frail, bald, sickly looking. Left a huge impression on me for reasons I still can't quite explain.
The point to all of this is that it is a scary thing. Really scary. But there are things and moments and situations and chaoses and events and everything in between, interspersed with emotional pits and mountains. Be happy, my friend. We're here to help you through this and will send our own individual measures of strength to aid and help you.
Good luck.
It's time to start a CAG fund for Tybee's neuticles. I'm in for $5.
