Yesterday I left my apartment for the first time since Tuesday. Deanna and I went for a short walk to the bakery, and then stopped at Donald’s Market before returning home. A few minutes after leaving, we passed a man and a dog on Garden street. I was carrying a camera around my neck.

“There’s a picture for you,” said the man, referring to the dog, who was attempting to poop on a patch of grass.

“He seems to be having some trouble,” I replied, noticing that the dog hadn’t produced anything yet, and seemed to have given up.

“She was diagnosed with cancer a couple of months back,” he said in excuse of the dog’s poor performance, and then looked down at her with sympathy.

I looked at Deanna with a raised eyebrow, and then turned back to man and dog, with whom we’d already parted ways. I raised my right hand, which became a theatrical fist above my head. I quietly shouted, “Solidarity, puppy! Solidarity.” The man laughed in a way that I think (but I’m not sure) connoted confusion.

“I wonder if he thought you were talking about the dog’s poop,” said Deanna when I turned back to her. I had thought about explaining what I’d meant to the man, but felt that the moment was best left as it was.

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About two weeks ago, it was becoming obvious to me that I had cancer.

There was no formal act of diagnosis. Just a series of clues which made their way past the doctors’ professional reluctance to let me know what was probably going on in my body.

The first clue was a couple of episodes of sharp pain I’d felt in my left testicle on the night of August 29th, first while stuck in the elevator at Workspace, then later at the Chair Factory. Although they were quite severe, these pains were funny, even to me. Testicles are funny. And testicle pain is also funny. When I was growing up, America’s Funniest Home Videos swept the airwaves largely based on the momentum it owed to the hilarity of testicle pain.

This hilarity was probably never more obvious than when I called the BC Nurses Hotline later that night in order to help decide whether to go to the hospital or not. My attempts to accurately describe testicular pain to a female nurse were so funny that Blaze laughed uncontrollably. At one point, the nurse asked me to go into a different room than Blaze, because she felt that it was mean of him to laugh at me. Her real reason for asking me to do this was clearly that laughter is contagious, and she was on the verge of losing it.

In addition to this puerile source of humor, there was also the fact that my girlfriend, who I hadn’t seen in about two months, was arriving in Vancouver the next day. A series of “blue balls” jokes peppered the evening’s conversation. The next day, my doctor told me I shouldn’t have sex until some test results came back. We all had lots of laughs.

The tests came back negative, and the pain went away over the next few days, and I stopped worrying about it. But my testicle still felt a little bit funny, and so I went back t my doctor and asked him to check me out a bit more. I have a young doctor, who I’ve taken to calling “Doctor New Brunswick” because he is from Fredericton. I think he’s a little bit homophobic, and I don’t think he enjoyed touching my balls. He sent me for an ultrasound, seemingly under the impression that it was just for the sake of being thorough.

The ultrasound was a couple of weeks later, and by this time, I suspected that something was wrong. While the ultrasound doctor squirted green gel all over my genitals, I read the sign on the door explaining that I would have to wait to see a doctor in order to get my results. But when the doctor left the room long enough for me to get dressed, he left an image on the computer screen of the insides of my two testicles juxtaposed next to one another, and the picture looked disturbingly asymmetrical. I had never been trained to read ultrasounds, but clearly there was something the matter with Lefty.

The first time anyone used the word cancer with reference to my testicle was about ten minutes later. Deanna and I were walking across Hastings Street to Toyatomi Sushi, and I suggested that cancer was the worst case scenario. It was Friday afternoon. I would see my doctor the following Thursday. I decided to wait until then to call my parents about it.

Halfway through a fairly quiet (but delicious) dinner of Age Dashi Tofu and Yam Tempura, however, Doctor New Brunswick called to tell me that I had a 2.5cm lump in my left testicle, and that he wanted to see me as soon as possible, which meant the following Tuesday morning.

On Tuesday, I asked him what else might be causing the lump, and he didn’t have an answer. On the blood test requisition form, he wrote “probable testicular cancer” as the diagnosis. This is about when I started telling my friends, family, and co-workers. Blaze waited less that thirty seconds before replying, “So I guess we’re going to have to start calling you ‘Lance’”.

A week later (one week ago today), I went to see a urologist. He looked younger than 30, had cufflinks which resembled tiny A-series Canon SLR’s, and greeted me by saying “well this is all very scary stuff, huh?” I agreed, not knowing what else to say. I was only in his office for fifteen minutes. Long enough for him to cop a feel (in a decidedly less homophobic manner than Doctor New Brunswick), and tell me that I had to have my testicle removed as soon as possible.

I was expecting for this to happen, but not so soon. He marched me out to a receptionist, saying to her, “when can I book some time for something…urgent?” If one of the cancer doctors couldn’t take care of it within a week, he explained, he would perform the surgery himself on the weekend. It turned out that there was a world-famous cancer specialist available for a half hour on Tuesday, and that I should be very pleased to have such a famous man cut my ball off. I was, in a way.

For my birthday, I received a CT Scan. The most interesting part was the feeling of the dye flowing through my circulatory system, noticeably warming one part at a time…

Then, Tuesday, I went for my semi-castration. The whole thing went pretty well. I met about ten very nice nurses, several doctors (I wasn’t conscious when I met the famous one though), and various other hospital workers. One of the doctors drew an arrow on my left leg, pointing to my genitals, which I think was meant to indicate which testicle was to be removed. This seemed very crude to me.

There was only one moment when I would describe myself as being particularly nervous. I was walking down the hall from a room in which several female nurses talked about a bunch of very banal things, and toward the operating room (#8, I remember). I had an I.V. attached to my arm. One of the operating room nurses was with me. I think her name was Amy. She wore a red bandana instead of a hair net like the others. We were just about to round the last corner, and I thought for a second or two about the fact that Amy was about to watch someone cut a hole in me and pull out one of my nuts.

The feeling went away as soon as I walked into the operating room, which was full of a bunch of people who looked very busy. Amy interrupted them by saying “Everyone, I would like you to meet Daniel Harris”. I waved to them, and they all welcomed me. It reminded me of the first day of school. Then I walked over to the table and reclined. An anesthesiologist, who I’d met earlier, told me he would first give me something to relax my muscles. I don’t remember losing consciousness.

When I woke up, I felt great. Well, actually, I don’t remember waking up. One of the nurses told me that I’d had a conversation with an Australian doctor that I’d forgotten. This doctor had come from Australia just to learn from the famous one. Apparently, the famous doctor has his own entourage.

The nurse gave me some opiates, which seemed to add to the positive feelings I had. I asked for Deanna a couple of times, and she came in to hang out with me. I don’t remember all this very clearly. After a few minutes, Deanna helped me to get dressed, and then we went outside, where Matt was waiting to drive me home. I remember listening to Jay Z and arguing about American Politics all the way home. The details are fuzzy.

So, for the past few days I have been recovering. Deanna and Blaze have taken great care of me, and I’m already feeling quite a bit better. Someone in a lab somewhere is currently slicing my former testicle into pieces small enough to do tests on. I’ll hear more about the tests in a week or two, apparently. I’m feeling optimistic.