EllingFamily:TogetherWeThrive

I was diagnosed with testicular cancer on March 9, 2004. I was working in my office as a technology coordinator late one afternoon when I felt intense pain in my left testicle. When I went to the bathroom to check out what was causing the pain, I came to find that my left testicle had swollen to twice its regular size and was sore to the touch. At this point I knew something was not right. I called my wife and she picked me up from work. We made our way to the emergency room at the Mercy Hospital in Mason City, Iowa.

After explaining to the admissions nurse what was going on, I was led into a room where I met with the on-call doctor. This doctor was extremely kind and took a look at my testicle. The doctor said it was probably a torsion or infection, but he was ordering an ultrasound as a precaution.

Within a half an hour I was disrobed and laying on a table with a sonographer running a device over my scrotum. After about two or three minutes I began to become concerned. The sonographer was clicking away on her computer keyboard, obviously marking areas she was seeing on screen. After about 15 minutes and the after the exam had finished, I asked if she had seen anything abnormal, at that point she said something to the affect that ?the doctor would be talking to me?. That was not the answer I was looking for and the sonographer would not make direct eye contact with me. I knew something was wrong.

I went back to the exam room. Finally after a few hours, the nurse gave me a shot of something for the pain and I waited for the return of the doctor. After about 30 minutes the emergency doctor returned and told me he thought I had testicular cancer. He told me that he had already talked to the hospital?s urologist and had an appointment set up with him for the next day. That night, however, he wanted to get a chest x-ray to see if I had any metastases already in my lungs. Luckily, the X-rays came back clear, the first bit of good news I had all night. Now I had to go home, call my parents and tell them the news the bad news. Now I had to start to think about how to beat testicular cancer.