Cancer and Unexpected Neutering
Mar. 15th, 2019 09:54 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
child_of_the_airI'm not sure if any of you reading of this have it as your main source of information on me, but if you do, I feel bad about not keeping you updated on this developing situation. (In other words, I have had a week
Thursday, 7 March, I had a consult for a gender-affirming orchiectomy (removal of testes) at a urology clinic north of Baltimore. This was the second orchiectomy consult I'd had: the first one didn't impress me much, as the surgeon spent two or three minutes talking to me after being an hour-and-a-half late to a morning appointment, and didn't examine the area. My doctor on Thursday was much better, and actually examined my testes. Which turned out to be a very good thing...because she found that my right testicle had a lump that was at least half the size of the whole testicle.
I spent that Thursday afternoon getting an ultrasound to confirm the lump, blood work that confirmed elevated levels of tumor markers, and a CT scan that confirmed no evidence of cancer in my lungs or lymph nodes, the two places that testicular cancer is most prone to spread. On Monday afternoon, I had a bilateral orchiectomy: the right testicle was removed inguinally to ensure they got all the cancer, and the left was removed transcrotally, since it was just being removed because of gender dysphoria.
I won't get the cytology report on the tumor until next week, which means I won't know for sure until then whether it was cancer, and what sort, and what the doctors will want to do about it (observation, radiation, chemotherapy), but hopefully they got everything when they removed the testicle and I won't have any recurrences.
My recovery has been going fairly well: as of two days ago I stopped taking opiates, and I'm now not on any painkillers at all, but don't feel much pain. I'll be taking it easy for a couple more days, though. And hopefully managing to write a couple more posts about this experience.
Thursday, 7 March, I had a consult for a gender-affirming orchiectomy (removal of testes) at a urology clinic north of Baltimore. This was the second orchiectomy consult I'd had: the first one didn't impress me much, as the surgeon spent two or three minutes talking to me after being an hour-and-a-half late to a morning appointment, and didn't examine the area. My doctor on Thursday was much better, and actually examined my testes. Which turned out to be a very good thing...because she found that my right testicle had a lump that was at least half the size of the whole testicle.
I spent that Thursday afternoon getting an ultrasound to confirm the lump, blood work that confirmed elevated levels of tumor markers, and a CT scan that confirmed no evidence of cancer in my lungs or lymph nodes, the two places that testicular cancer is most prone to spread. On Monday afternoon, I had a bilateral orchiectomy: the right testicle was removed inguinally to ensure they got all the cancer, and the left was removed transcrotally, since it was just being removed because of gender dysphoria.
I won't get the cytology report on the tumor until next week, which means I won't know for sure until then whether it was cancer, and what sort, and what the doctors will want to do about it (observation, radiation, chemotherapy), but hopefully they got everything when they removed the testicle and I won't have any recurrences.
My recovery has been going fairly well: as of two days ago I stopped taking opiates, and I'm now not on any painkillers at all, but don't feel much pain. I'll be taking it easy for a couple more days, though. And hopefully managing to write a couple more posts about this experience.
