Health
It Takes Balls
This disease can rob you of your manhood—and more. Here's the heads up on what's down below
By Donovan Webster; Photographs by Jonathan Kantor
For John Perez, life was good. It was December of 2000, and after several years of grinding labor—working through cooking school and sautéing his way up the food chain of Manhattan's finest restaurants—he'd left his assistant-chef job at a three-star eatery called Zoë to start his own catering house. At 35 years old, the sturdy, dark-haired Perez was living the life he had dreamed of. Through the fall and winter of 2000, he spent his days jetting around the country cooking up parties and meals for the famous and powerful, a group that included the fashion designer
John Varvatos. Then, in mid-December, during the peak of his fledgling company's holiday rush, Perez's world suddenly became very small.
"I felt this little mass the size of a pea on my left testicle," he says. "I thought, What? That's new. So after I got out of the shower, I told my wife, Marisa."
The following day, Perez consulted his urologist, who performed a series of blood tests. The results came back 90 minutes later. They were positive for a "marker compound" called beta chorionic gonadotropin (beta hCG), which occurs naturally only in the blood of pregnant women and in people with certain cancers, testicular cancer among them.
After the positive beta hCG screen, Perez's doctor ordered a sonogram. The left testicle showed an unusual growth. ("When he found it, the technician shouted, ‘Aha! There's your tumor!'" Perez now jokes.) But with positive findings from the most accurate tests for testicular cancer, the uncertainty Perez had felt for the past day now plummeted into dread.
"By 7 that night," he says, "I had cancer."
A SNEAK ATTACK
While testicular cancer ranks among the rarest forms of the disease—comprising only about 1 percent of all cancers in men—it's the most common one among men age 15-35. Last year, according to the National Cancer Institute in the US, 7,400 American men were diagnosed with it, though those cases were far from equally distributed among the races: Testicular cancer is four times more prevalent in white men than in blacks of similar age, and two times more likely than in Asians.
Doctors may have identified the disease's target demographic, but they've yet to figure out its trigger. "All we know is this: If you had an undescended testicle as a child, your risk of testicular cancer rises 25- to 50-fold, though we don't know the reason," says Jerome P. Richie, MD, a professor of surgery at the Harvard University school of medicine.
Some researchers believe abnormal growth of the testicles in childhood or a rare genetic condition called Kleinfelter's syndrome (a disorder in which males have two X chromosomes and one Y chromosome) may start the cancer, but Dr. Richie—one of the United States's top testicular-cancer specialists—discounts these theories as questionable. Instead, he reiterates that testicular cancer can occur in any young man, regardless of risk factors. "Even a seemingly healthy man can be afflicted with it."
Although we don't know much about what triggers testicular cancer, the prognosis for defeating it has become exceedingly positive. According to Craig Nichols, MD, chairman of oncology at Oregon Health Sciences University in the US, the past quarter century has seen the rate of cure skyrocket. "In the 1970s, only 10 percent to 20 percent of all men diagnosed with metastatic testicular cancer survived," he says. "Today we have about a 95 percent cure rate. A testicular-cancer diagnosis isn't the death sentence it was 25 or 30 years ago."
» Health archive
Men's Health Philippines - November 2005 Issue
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