Here is the short version of the last 13 years of my life. Remember, I am 35.

When I was 22 I had pain in my right testical. A lot pain. I was going to school at Chico State. Rewind a year prior I was in Flagstaff at Northern Arizona State. had something similar happen. A very *bad* It was diagnosed as epididimitis. Infection in the part of the testicil that produces your sperm or semen.

The condensed version of that story is that it made me very uncomfortable to see doctors, especially when my nuts were involved.

A year later, Chico California I started to develop the pain again. The lump was there too. Shit, not again. I went to see the nurse practitioner there, and he was a very nice guy. Though I knew it wasn’t gonera, the symptoms were there and I was given a lot of antibiotics and pain killers.

Next week pain is getting worse. Nurse Practioner gives me more antibiotics (shot) more pain killers. I told him it couldn’t be Gonera, but he told me there are other ways to get an infetion there. Back to the Epitidimitis.

Week 2 pain a lot worse. Terrible. I can’t sleep, I feel like I had been kicked in the nut and the pain never went away. Back to the clinic. Another shot of antibiotic and more pain killers and a long weekend.

Entering into the next week. Pain unbelivable. I see the doctor, he refers me to a Urologist. Shit, I was just recovering from the last prick. I had no choice.

Wednsday, pain really really bad, Uroloogist in under 5 minutes makes the diagnosis. Testicular Cancer. Now I was apparently lucky. The tumor was hemerging on the nerve center causing pain, normally TC doesn’t.

Friday Testicil removed. Due to circumstances I elected for a surgery to dig out any other tumors. One was found. Small tumor, but warrented 2 rounds of Chemo.

The fucked up thing is, TC spreads quickly. If I was properly diagnosed I would have been spared the full RPLND, in which I was litterally gutted, intestines placed outside, dug in, and removed some lymphnodes. The cancer had spread. Most likely if I would have been diagnosed correctly at the beging. The lump being slightly away from the epiditimis, thus being very obvious to someone that took a 2 hour course in diagnosing it. Very Simple.

Testicular Cancer is the most common cancer for young men between 15-35 years old. (laugh or not, but if you are in range, check your balls daily, feel a lump, go to the doctor, this is as important as Women doing breast exams)

In a college setting you would think this was something the medical people would know. They didn’t. The schools website had in depth education on breast cancer, but a horribel, hard to find on TC.

Ok, that was a little longer than expected, but the point is coming.

I had my mother’s medical insurance, the best I have ever had. The clinic at the school was free, though could have used a simple course to figure out my problem. But it still could have been more than enough to figure out my problem sooner.

The problem was not in the health care, but in the lack of knowledge of the doctors. It was poor planning that could have been corrected. And should be now. If not I need to have another chat with them.

Fast forward 10 years later, the chemo weakend my disks, and being sesptiple to disk degeneration already, my back show signs of a 5mm buldge. This has created off and on back problems. In 2008 I started to have this pain in my femeral nerve. The first 3 months of 2008 I had Kaiser.

At first it was great. I got right into see a Urologist, Cancer ruled out. I was then refered to pain management. Where through a series of blunders and misteps, the doctors once again did a poor job at figuring out what the pain was.

I have many surgical clips left in me. The doctors assured and even mocked my wife for claiming that was the source of the problem. After painful nerve blocks, having to go on disablity for a couple months, nearly loosing my job, I left Kaiser for my insurance.

I was lucky to get Roy Disney Jr.s old doctor. A doctor to many executives at Disney, and a kick ass doctor. He through me in the hospital for 10 days to figure out what was wrong with me.

They found a lot, but could not figure out what the pain was from. That is what my doctor wanted to be fixed.

5 doctors, a Urologist, Pain Anastisologis, Muscular Anistisiolgist, my doctor, a Neurologist all thought that sending a scope down in me to figure out what was there causing me the problems.

I was released from the hospital and went in search of a doctor that would do the surgery. UCLA rejected me since I no longer had cancer. USC Urologist threw his hands up and said he didn’t know, saw another pain specialist. Then saw 2 more Urologist that didn’t want to do the surgery. Then a general surgeon. He didn’t want to do it either, wanted to school all the other doctors for not seeing it was simply scare tissue.

2 Doctors said he was wrong, that would be on the other side, not the good side. It was effecting my last nut which just pissed me off.

Finally my doctor tossed me back into the hospital. The general surgeon’s assistant (hottie) agreed surgery would be best.

1 week to get an appointment (shit load of pain) 2 weeks for the surgery. F that, my doctor told me to go into the ER Sunday night. I was in the hospital until Tuesday.

This is now 1 year and 20 days since the problem started. They had found pressed firmly against my genital femerol nerve a surgical clip. Score a billion for Jen (wife) who said it was that all along.

It took me 9 months to recover. 6 weeks ago my back took a turn for the worse. No pain, but some bad symptoms. MRI done. But there is an added problem. My neck, which I just had an MRI done, and made the mistake of looking at the pictures. Not too thrilled and curious to how bad the doctor thinks it is. To me, it hurts like a bitch. It has been a problem since I was 11 years old. Bad neck spams through the years.

So I am not looking forward to another round of this shit.

Now I have good insurance. My insurance is very similar if not the same as the executives at Disney. Kaiser, though a sloppy machine of poorly executed processes, all were capable of finding this a lot sooner. What got me was the process, the procedures, some of these doctors were just robots going from a handbook.

The doctors were unable to work as a team to figure out what the fuck was wrong with me. And I paid the price. From the cancer in Chico to the finding of the surgical clip.

Now my oncologist, when I was with him as a team, he helped people from all angels. He made more than enough money so everyone didn’t need to pay the same. It is amazing on how much the doctors want to work with what they have. But when you too much away from the doctors and put price tags on things enters in the buracracy and decision makers then you have a real problem.

It isn’t that the US has bad health care, it is that the good parts of it are so hard and made almost impossible to access. There is a fundemental problem that goes beyond the bill.

I have spent a lot of time in the Emrgency Room, Clinics, doctors offices, to see what is broken here it so over looked, but so easy to fix it makes me ill to think about it.

Where the true concern with reform is the fact that if I don’t work for a company like Disney I am boned. I am almost uninsurable. I can’t be an independent contractor, only Disney could get away with finding someone to insure me. And the insurances are the ones that put me in this position to start with. Well to some degree, cancer played a role too. I don’t like cancer, especailly cancer that goes for the balls., but that is just me. All cancers suck, lost too much to it, but after having it, at least I can make cancer jokes about it. And I have gotten out of a few thousand dollars worth of fines, and literally played the cancer card to get a friend out of a mistermeanor. But I digress.

I don’t like to brag, but healthy, I am freaking awesome! I do great work, I have a lot to be proud of, and have paid a great deal into the system. To think that those two things cannot help me. There is something wrong with the approach. Until we fix that, we are screwed.

Enough with that, my ships are back. For those still reading, check your balls, and when it comes to health care, be smart until they can catch up.

The first, go over the edge. This show has to end sometime, ever act gets pulled. I have no doubt in my mind that I cannot live my life like this. This is not a pain that I want controlled by mind numbing pain killers.

After my last nerve injection my doctor extended my leave by a week, then told me that I should talk to the long term disability service and then doubled my pain medication. Nothing says, “I give up” quite like that.

I have put up with a lot of crap from doctors in my life. I wonder what I would have been like if the doctors did not mess up as they did. I first went to the medical clinic at Chico State with a lump in my testicle since mid August 1997. Despite not having sex for close to a year I was treated for Chlamydia for three and a half weeks. Two types of oral antibiotics and three injections of very powerful antibiotics, but this STD I knew I didn’t have didn’t go away. I think this is because it wasn’t an STD. Though the not having sex should have been the first sign, the second sign is the lump was near but not on the epididymis.

After weeks in pain, I was referred to a urologist. If the pain was not so severe there is no way I would have gone to one. Only a year prior during an examination by a urologist certain things occurred that prompted me to file a police report for sexual abuse against the doctor. The officer that took the report as well as several advocates wanted to see this guy fry. Unfortunately the detective didn’t even interview the doctor and told me that if you go to a urologist you have to expect things like that to happen. I know very clearly where the line is, and I know it was crossed.

After abandoning my speech scholarship, dropping out of school, and splitting up with my fiance I was finally getting my life back together. I knew that if it weren’t for the pain I would have rather died that go to see the urologist. It took me almost a month of scoping out a nurse practitioners and doctors to find one that I trusted enough to tell them about my testicular pain. I never really blamed the nurse practitioner for not uncovering the obvious tumor as much as I did the people that trained him and the complete lack of education about testicular cancer. Chico State had a full site on breast cancer. The in depth information on a cancer that would not affect the female population for another 20 – 40 years dwarfed the single page that dealt with the most common type of cancer among college males.

I thought about suing the school and was approached by a couple lawyers, but I knew where that money to pay me off would come from. Classes such as ballroom dance would be cut and the ability to have lectures such as She-mo Perez and Ice-Tea would be lost. I could not do that to my classmates, so I did the next best thing, I raised awareness. I openly talked about my experience. When I gave a presentation or speech I can tell that this was my way of correcting the injustice, not by taking money away from the school.

The doctor that discovered the cancer was a surgeon. I was 22 and things were happening very fast. I was 500 miles away from my family doctors and decisions had to be made quickly. The doctor advocated the second surgery and the option to have chemo was never entertained until the second tumor was found. I lost the ability to conceive a child naturally and eleven years later I am still feeling the after effects of an unskilled surgeon gutting my insides. I probably could have got a settlement from his malpractice insurance, but there was no way I was going to sue the man that save my life.

The string of misdiagnosis and neglect from insurance companies and lazy doctors did not end there. After having chronic back pain a degenerative disk was found and my vertebrae was beginning to herniate. The neurologist said that surgery would help it, but that is a last ditch no where to turn measure. I knew how sensitive the nerves in that area are and it wasn’t a risk I was willing to take just yet.

The doctor gave me some muscle relaxers, physical therapy, and told me to see him again in three months. As a cost cutting measure I was not approved to follow up with the neurologist that ordered the MRI that spoted the bulging disk, but I was referred to pain management. I have always has this mystery problem with my neck the doctors could never figure out. Doing the type of exercises PT required caused great pain in my neck. The doctor then ordered a lumbar injection. The following days after the injection were a nightmare. Jen had to take me to the emergency room it was so severe.

As it turns out, the doctor order the injection without first view an MRI and apparently gave the injection in the wrong location. This most likely had nothing to do with my pain, but the fact that the doctor did that made me skeptical about pain management.

When the pain in my side went critical at the start of the year Jen certain things had happened that made Jen urge me to use her insurance. At first, as with any courting, it looked like Kaiser had their practice down, and they were going to find out what was wrong with me.

The referred me to a fertility specialist that thought it might be cancer so an oncologist had to rule it out. I was then sent to the pain clinic. There the ambitious doctor proposed a series of nerve blocks for a differential, however, as time went on I began to suspect that 6 weeks between appointments and nerve blocks is not how a differential should be done.

I could write more of the same, but I am not going to. Twenty four hours after my nerve block I have been in critical pain, I spent all day on the couch, moving was torture. Jen tried all day to get a hold of my doctor, who was out of the office. The pharmacist doctor finally returned her call at 4:30. This was after I spent an hour trying to get a hold of my GP or someone in his office. The advice nurse gave her useual advice, go to the emergency room. I told her that I would go if it was life treating, but I am not going to put myself through hell to get a quick injection and sent on my way.

Today I was pushed to the edge, and I admit, jumping crossed my mind like a marquee. Unfortunately, that is not my style. Tomorrow, I am going to start to push back. I know when I get better, there will be a lot these doctors and this system needs to answer for. This isn’t a cost issue, but laziness of doctors that do not want to be burdened with googling RLND to see what kind of surgery their patient had, the very surgery they figured caused the pain in the first place.

I am angry. I know I am not the only one. That makes me even more angry.

^{originally published December 2nd, 2004}

It has been eight years since I finished my final round of chemotherapy. I was cured. Some days it seems like it was just yesterday, but most days it seems like a lifetime ago. It’s amazing how quickly life can change.

In September of ‘96, my life was heading in a different direction; it has been so long that I don’t quite remember what direction it was going in, but I sure as hell know this isn’t the path that I saw for myself. People would tell me that things happen for a reason. Two surgeries later, two rounds of chemotherapy, pneumonia, a degenerative disk from the chemo, nerve damage, the loss of being able to have children-I still wonder: what was the point of all that? Why did this need to happen? I still don’t know the answer to that question, but I do know that I feel like an ass every time I ask myself that. I am thankful that it was me and not one of my friends or cousins.I don’t want that ever to happen to someone that I care about.

I know I should feel lucky, but most of the time I just feel guilty. I got a curable kind of cancer. Yes it sucked, still does suck, and I guess it always will always suck, but it isn’t going to kill me. We think of all the shitty things that we have to go through in our daily lives while most people my age will never know what it is like to tell their mother that they have cancer. Sometimes you will think about how shitty it must be to get out of bed and go to work. This sucks, because we should be glad that we have the ability to get out of bed. Yeah, things suck sometimes, and for some of us most of the time, but we can still get up. Tomorrow, we will be okay. My uncle once said, “You know, if you have a warm bed to sleep in, three square meals, and nobody is shooting at you, then things aren’t that bad.”

Some days we feel like throwing in the towel, saying “that’s it, I give up,” but deep down inside we know that we would never do that. I remember my cousin telling me that people would ask him if it was hard to grow up without his mother, who died when he was fifteen. He told me that he would tell them that he didn’t have a choice-he did what he had to do. He said that it was much like what I was going through. I didn’t have a choice; I did what I had to do. Shit happens, and sometimes we are stuck with it, but giving up is never an option.

One thing always stood out in my mind when I was getting chemo. I would be there for eight to ten hours, and I would see people come and go. Most of them were sixty or seventy years old, and I thought, I want that to be me when I get that age. Not that I wanted cancer; I just want to be that age and still be fighting hard for my life, even if only to extend it by a month or two. I think of this one girl, the only one my age there. She had melanoma on her lung. She asked me if I was going to be okay. I told her yes and asked her if she would be okay. She told me they didn’t know, that they needed to see if this round of chemo would shrink the tumor. She is dead now, and so are most of the people that were in the office the days that I was there. I was one of the few that survived this long and I will continue to survive as the years go on. I am not sure what that means, but I do know that it means something.

Your Friend, Vincent