Cancer on Five Dollars a Day* *(chemo not included): How Humor Got Me through the Toughest Journey of My Life (17 page)

I had my first brush with cancer when I was thirteen. As I said, I was born with an undescended testicle. My left one. The doctors wanted to perform experimental surgery on me, which involved pulling my ball down. I’ve blocked out most of the details, but essentially they had to open my ball sac, stitch it to my thigh, hook my left ball to a kind of bungee cord, then yank on it. Basically, we’re talking ball-stretching surgery. They were concerned that an undescended testicle could be an indicator of cancer later in life. Okay, they got that right. Unfortunately, they didn’t get the surgery so right because apparently after they pulled my ball down and unhooked it, it shot right back up. Like the ball hitting the bottom bumper in a pinball machine. Makes me very glad I was unconscious during the procedure.

About fifteen years later, I’m having a routine physical. My internist, call him Dr. Stern, has a kind, round face and is incredibly short, about as tall as a jockey. We’re in the last leg of the exam when Dr. Stern asks me to drop my boxers. He wriggles his hand into a pair of rubber gloves and starts examining my scrotum. He suddenly frowns. “Your left testicle feels funny,” he says.

“Well, I’ve had an undescended testicle,” I explain. “Ever since I was a little kid.”

I cough. It’s not that easy having a conversation with a guy while he’s cupping your nuts. At least not for me.

“It feels funny,” he says again, still clutching my left ball. I wonder if I should offer to buy him a drink. Then Dr. Stern moves his hand over to my right ball and squeezes. This I don’t like. I grunt.

“Yeah,” he says. “That’s what I thought. Your left testicle hasn’t developed the way it should have.”

Oh yeah. That’s just what you want to hear during a routine checkup.

“
Your left ball hasn’t developed the way it should have.”

Great. I have one normal ball and one pygmy ball. Wonderful. My ego is doing cartwheels.

“I want to do a biopsy,” Dr. Stern says.

“Really?”

“A precaution. But I think we need to do it.”

“Okay, so, what, you stick a needle in there and you—?”

“No,” he says.

“No?”

“A needle? Who told you that?”

“Nobody. I just assumed—”

“No needle. We take your testicle out, we do the biopsy, and then we get the results.”

“How do you put it back?”

“We don’t.”

“You don’t put my ball back?”

“No. What for?”

“What
for
? Because it’s mine. I want my ball back.”

“Doesn’t work that way.”

“I’m only gonna have one ball for the rest of my
life
?”

“Robert, a lot of people are walking around with only one ball.”

“Yeah? Like who?”

Dr. Stern scrunches up his forehead. Thinks. “Bruce Lee,” he says finally.

“Bruce Lee?”

“Yeah.”

“He’s not walking around. He’s dead.”

“All right. Bad example. There are a lot of guys, believe me. Lot of macho guys, too.”

“You mean unlike me.”

“Let me think for a minute.” Dr. Stern drops his chin onto his hand, rests it there, and studies the floor. “Okay. Yeah. He has one ball.”

“Who?”

“That tough-guy actor. You know who I mean.”

I take a shot. “Charles Bronson?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“He’s dead, too. Jesus.”

“Well, if you’re interested,” Dr. Stern says, “I can put a fake one in there.”

“I don’t want a fake ball.”

“No one will know the difference.”

“Really?”

“Let me get one. I’ll show you. You can hold it. Play around with it. Tell me what you think.” He shuffles toward a metal file cabinet.

“Play around with it? What is it, a toy?”

Dr. Stern unlocks one of the file drawers and rummages around inside. “Here we go,” he says, pulling something out of an envelope.

He leans his back into the file drawer, closing it with a clang, and shuffles back toward me. He hands me a small flesh-colored rubber sphere.

“This?” I say.

“Yep.”

The “ball” looks nothing like a ball. It looks like a novelty item you’d buy at Halloween, one of those funny pink faces with two exaggerated wide eyes, floppy ears, and goofy grin. I stare at Dr. Stern.

“You think this looks like a real ball?”

“Once it’s in.”

I roll it around between my palms. I squeeze it. I smush it. “Feels weird.”

He shrugs.

“No offense, but you can definitely tell the difference,” I say.

He shrugs again. “Think about it.”

I do. I think about it very carefully. First, there’s no way I could ever jerk off again without saying to myself,
Yeahyeah-yeah
.
Man, my left ball just doesn’t feel real.
I certainly couldn’t do the blindfold test with myself, the which-is-my-fake-ball? test. It’s clear which is real and which is Rubbermaid.

Second, what about getting laid? If a woman touches you for the first time and says, “Wow, your left ball feels funny,” you feel tempted to ask her, “Really? How many balls have you held that make you an expert? Great. I’m sleeping with the country’s leading fake ball authority.”

Once you get past that, how do you explain it?

“Robert, what’s this?”

“What?”

“This. Your left ball is weird.”

“Oh. Okay, you know what? It’s not real.”

“It’s not
real
?”

“Yeah, see this one’s real, this one isn’t. I lost that ball. I didn’t
lose
it per se. They had to take it out. So I had a fake one put in. See, I didn’t want just one ball. I’m insecure enough. Hey, why are you getting dressed?”

Maybe some guys wouldn’t mention it at all. I just feel compelled to bring it up. Full disclosure. I think it’s best to get it over with early, before foreplay, somewhere between the hot and heavy kissing and the tearing off of the clothes.

“Look, I gotta tell you, before we go any further, I have a fake ball.”

It sounds so bad. Feels like it’s gonna put a damper on the whole evening, ruin the romance. I’m probably paranoid. Because, come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve ever heard a woman talk about balls. Either in real life or in a porno movie. I’ve never heard, “Hey, Greg’s got some really nice balls.”

You don’t hear that much. The only time women talk about balls is when a guy has only one, a fake one, or three.

I’m also a little worried about my reputation. Women talk. Word gets around. I can see myself walking into a party and everybody whispering and pointing,
buzz-buzz-buzz,
“Look, it’s Johnny One-Ball,” “Hey, Bob, you wanna play
ball
?” “Hey, you didn’t see a
ball
around here, did you?”

Who needs that?

I consider all of this, but finally I decide to go for it. Then right before the operation, Dr. Stern drops another bombshell.

“The material the prosthetic testicle is made from has a kind of thermos bottle quality to it. You follow?”

“I think so. My fake ball is like a lunch pail. Is that what you’re trying to say?”

“Sort of. What I’m saying is that it will adapt to outside temperatures.”

“Give me an example.”

Dr. Stern scratches the top of his head. “Let’s say you’re outside in the snow, sledding, or skiing, or something.”

“Sledding? Do I look Swedish?”

“Just go with me. When you come inside, into a warm house, your body temperature will increase, but your artificial testicle will remain the temperature it is outside.”

“Wow. And the other way around, too, right? So if I come out of a hot bath and get into bed with a woman, she’s gonna say, ‘This is weird. Your body is cool but your left ball is hot.’”

“Exactly.”

“Yeah. Quite a conversation piece, this fake ball. Dr. Stern, I don’t know about this.”

“Robert, it’s no big deal.”

“Not for you.”

Dr. Stern grins and then jabs me in the arm with a needle, injecting me with a little something to take the edge off. Otherwise, if I spend one more second thinking about what is about to happen in my very precious lower region, if I contemplate that Dr. Stern is about to remove my left testicle and replace it with a heat-and-cold-attracting circular piece of flesh-colored plastic rubber fake ball, I just might back out.

Within seconds I’m floating, gonzo, feeling no pain, stoned, giddy, all my anxiety evaporated, except for one last tiny remnant, an image of a gorgeous nurse tonguing into my ear, “I’ve always found you so sexy, Robert. Unfortunately, I only go for guys with two balls.”

And then I’m blinking into the blinding overhead lights of the operating room, and through a squint see Dr. Stern, round-faced, barely tall enough to perform the operation without a ladder, smiling up at me.

“You want to see it before we put it in?” he says.

“Yeah. I would.”

“Okay.” He turns to a nurse a few feet behind him. “Give me one of those prosthetic testicles, would you?”

“Here you go,” she says and tosses it to him. My future fake left ball arcs toward Dr. Stern, hits him right in the hands, and pops out.

“Lost it in the lights,” he says, stooping down and scooping it off the floor. He looks at it, frowns. “This one’s too big.”

The nurse shrugs. “It’s the smallest one they make.” “You know what?” I say. “Fuck you guys.”

By now, Dr. Stern, the nurse, and the rest of the blue-scrubbed operating support staff are roaring.

“A little pre-op humor,” Dr. Stern says, catching his breath. “Come on, Robert. We’d only do this with you.”

“That’s great. You really had me going. You guys have a lot of fun in here, don’t you?”

“Oh yeah,” Dr. Stern says. “We have a
ball
.”

He holds for a second, then they all burst out laughing again. Ha-ha-ha-ha. I feel like I’m in an
SNL
take-off of a medical show
,
the unfortunate guest star about to go under the knife.

The good news is that I don’t have testicular cancer. As for my fake ball, Dr. Stern is right on the money. Nobody notices that I have one regular ball and one made of Silly Putty. The question never comes up.

Except years later when I go in for an MRI.

I’m about to lay down inside the torpedo-shaped, claustrophobic capsule, which I’m actually looking forward to because it’s the only place I can get any peace and quiet, when the nurse steps in. What a nurse. She looks like Scarlett Johansson, only hotter.

“Hi, I’m Lulu.”

“Nurse Lulu. How you doin’? I’m Patient Robert.”

“I can’t believe this. I’m such a big fan. Do you think later, maybe, I could—”

Wait, did I say that out loud?

“—have your autograph?”

“Sure. Absolutely. You bet. Definitely.”

“Ohmygod. That is
so
cool. Thank you
so
much. Okay, before we begin the scan, I have to ask you a couple of questions. The answer is probably no, but are you wearing dentures or do you have any prosthetic devices?”

Do I really have to tell her about my fake ball?

To make matters worse, Nurse Lulu tee-hees in a super-sexy voice.

I don’t want to tell this hottie who I’m fantasizing about that I have one nut. What a turn-off. That’ll really kill my chances with her. But I don’t want to go inside the MRI tube and have the machine go
whirrrr-whirrrr-whirrrr
before it blows up, and then have Dr. Stern’s voice come over the loudspeaker like the voice of God, thundering at me, “Bob, you didn’t lie about the ball, did you?”

I have to tell her. But maybe I can save the day by making up something cool about how I got it. Something exotic. Something that will help me get laid, instead of turning me into a carnival freak.

For a while I considered having the procedure done in Vietnam so I could tell everyone that I lost my ball in Nam. Think of the edge that’d give me. Women would assume I was a war hero.

I couldn’t go through with it. Before I slide into the MRI machine, I tell Nurse Lulu the truth.

She doesn’t bat an eye. Doesn’t faze her at all.

Since then, so far, so good. Nobody’s asked about the fake ball during sex. Nobody seems to care. Or maybe during those three minutes of passion, nobody noticed.

In my cancer support group, which consists of a dozen people who are on the brink of facing death, we mainly talk about life. We talk about our families, our passions, and, believe it or not, our futures. One by one we speak about what we have done and not done. We talk about our loves, losses, and regrets. We talk about wishes unfulfilled and plans unmade. We make promises to each other and ourselves, promises that include a tomorrow that sees us living in it. We vow to remove all the bullshit from our lives and to get our priorities in order. We give ourselves permission to live our lives to the fullest, now and forever.