The story in my nutshell!

The old me

I am a 33 year old Army Officer who joined up 11 years ago in search of adventure. I traveled the world witnessing both conflict and peace. I was physically active and regularly tested my limits. Health and fitness; mind, body, spirit; pursuit of excellence; these weren’t mantras, they were how I tried to live my life. I was rarely ill and had faith in my body’s ability to recover quickly, if not avoid ailments altogether. In short, I felt invincible.

The start of it all

As I climbed towards the pretty stunning view that you see above in Nepal (on an expedition I had organised) I started to experience real pain and stiffness in my right leg, particularly when climbing steps or steep uphill legs. I’d noticed some issues with my leg in the month building up to this but had presumed it was a minor injury I had picked up in the gym. I went from being the trek organiser to the guy at the back everyone had to wait for. Even my friend who had explosive diarrhoea and regularly had to disappear into the trees would make most rest stops ahead of me. I managed to trek through the pain, mostly because I had no other choice. As soon as we were back in the UK I arranged to see my physio. He was alarmed enough to send me straight into the GP next door, who in turn sent me to hospital to be scanned for deep vein thrombosis. Bloods and scan were all normal. A few weeks later, just before Christmas, I started to experience excruciating back pain. By January I was throwing up in work, crying in my room and passing out from pain. It was constant, and for the next few months I didn’t manage to sleep for more than 2-3 hours unbroken. Not once.

From Himalayas to Alps

My GP didn’t seem to believe how debilitating my pain was, keeping me on ibuprofen far longer than I thought was reasonable. Eventually, my physio convinced him to prescribe me some cocodamol, if nothing else to help me on a skiing camp I had signed up to - I know it was stupid but due to my grants I would have been financially worse off by not going. This way I assumed I could try a day or two of skiing to see how I fared and if I couldn’t hack it at least I could work remotely with an alpine view! It was my first time downhill skiing, and I loved it. Unfortunately, after a couple of days my leg had swollen so much I could no longer fit it into my ski boots. Cue some rest in the spa.

On returning to the UK I was delighted to finally receive a referral to a specialist military injury assessment clinic. The team comprising a doctor, nurse and PT were brilliant, particularly the doctor who decided to rescan me for a DVT but was adamant she would need to scan above my leg to assess the vessels supplying it. Almost immediately she noticed something that clearly disconcerted her. We didn’t speak about it other than to arrange some scans for the following week. A few hours later, I received a call from her saying she’d changed her mind and wanted me to immediately present to A&E for an urgent CT scan. I did as I was told. I expected I’d be in and out within a few hours, and was even certain enough to order a takeaway back to base. A takeaway it seems I wasn’t destined to have!

8 hours later I finally had the scan, and 5 hours after that I was awoken at 5am by the on call doctor with my results. He told me the scan had found a large mass. Too early and no specialist to say whether or not it was malignant, but more immediately concerning was the impact it was having on my kidney. I would need to be admitted immediately for an emergency surgery to insert a stent from my kidney to my bladder to allow it to drain properly. When he told me the proposed method of entry, I nearly passed out with squeamishness. It was a lot of information to receive unexpectedly at 5am. I thought I was going to have a break down, but I did as told and went to the pre-surgery ward.

My first ever night in hospital

A day later I had the surgery. The procedure was painless. As I was being put under I couldn’t help but think of my poor chap. When I came round I remember sitting bolt upright, screaming “My cock!”, and throwing up on the nurse in the recovery room. Once I apologised and was cleaned up I was taken down to the ward. I felt entirely unscathed. Then I went for my first piss, and nearly passed out. Thankfully, that particular soreness lasted about a day and a half. It would be another 3 weeks before I was eventually discharged, with the hospital staff focusing on how to break down the clot in my vascular system and desperately trying to refer me to a hospital that could handle a biopsy on s tumour measuring 6x11x17cm, which was wrapped around several major blood vessels, was abutting my kidney, and was shielded from access by its location within my pelvis. Thankfully, a referral was finally made to the Royal Marsden.

Diagnosis, at last

At RMH, I came under the care of the sarcoma team in Chelsea, with everyone all but convinced that’s what we were dealing with (sarcoma = tumour arising from bone or connective tissue). They did the biopsy a week later, and then a further week later I received a 7 minute phone call that turned my life upside down. In those minutes I heard the words “testicular cancer”, “tumour”, “both lungs” and “stage 4”. Now, I’d been pretty well behaved at not doom scrolling through every page on Google, but even I knew what he was saying: I was fucked. Thankfully some conversations with my closest friends very soon after helped me to process and rationalise what I had heard. I prepared a script with some of the information I could pass to my parents over the phone (I needed them to collect me from base and bring me home so I could then attend a clinic at the RMH Sutton site). Thankfully, speaking to my new team unpicked a lot of the complexity and confusing terminology. It turns out I didn’t need to worry about stages with TC, but prognoses, and mine wasn’t “poor”, it was “intermediate”. Additionally, even though this was TC, my balls seemed unaffected. And finally, I had another massive tumour in my abdomen that no earlier scans had picked up and no one had thought to mention when they eventually did until now. 

Treatment. Right after a trip to the bank…

My consultant was adamant we needed to start treatment quickly, and as best as I could tolerate, aggressively. I was to be prescribed a treatment of BEP as well as being put forward for a trial - no change to overall length or dosage, but rather than have 2 weeks’ recovery between sessions I would potentially have only 1 week.

So there we had it; I had ball cancer in my lungs, two massive balls of extra cancer in my trunk, and two otherwise unaffected balls that were about to be sterilised by an onslaught of chemicals. This gave me just about enough time to try and register and attend a sperm banking clinic before starting my first cycle. I got in with just a few days to spare. Thankfully my first sample was good - motility was slightly higher than the average, and as for concentration. Compared to the 15m sperm per ml minimum requirement, I managed to churn out a positively chewy >80m/ml. Just as well, because when I went back for the optional second sample (seemed a stupid opportunity to turn down), the situation got the better of me, physically and mentally. The slow walking stick-aided journey from East Acton station to Hammersmith Hospital sapped me of my energy, almost as much as the meds had robbed me of my libido and the sterile wank prison killed off what little buzz the screen of my iPhone 8 managed to conjure in desperate support. After an hour of trying to convince myself I could maybe use the tears as lube, I eventually received a knock to let me know time was up. It was a sad way to end a sad experience. Thank whatever powers may be for that unexpectedly successful first deposit.

Anyway, less about what I was trying to pump out and more about what they docs wanted to pump in… If selected at random to be on the accelerated BEP scheme, the bright side was that I would get the majority of chemo into my system and attacking the cancer much faster, and I would also be onto an outpatient basis a lot sooner, allowing me to focus on getting back into a new routine outside of hospital. I’m glad to report that during my first week of chemo I was anccepted onto the accelerated scheme. I have been unfairly lucky with regards to symptoms. Yes, chemo is a bit shit. I’m knackered, regularly feel nauseated, my resting heart rate has increased by over 50% its normal rate, and my usually thick and untameable hair is no more. However, within a day of starting chemo, my pain completely disappeared. I was on a potent cocktail of painkillers, anti-convulsants, and anti-depressants (for pain management) - I’ve since weaned myself of almost all of it, and I now sleep every night. I’m conscious symptoms are only going to trend in one direction, and I’m bracing myself for the worst, but I’m halfway through my course of chemo and am finding it better than expected. I mean, bloody hell, I’m actually back to working out at the gym (albeit with children’s dumbbells) for the first time since October! I’m actually in a better state halfway though an accelerated chemo programme that I had been for months prior.

The current me

Anyway, I’m Alex. A 33 year old, active, adventuring, very much not invincible Army Officer, and this is my Testicular Cancer story so far. If you’ve made it to here, thank you for reading my story, and by all means feel free to follow me on Insta (majorballache) if you want to see more regular snaps of my progress. Finally, to all my brothers out there waging their own battle against this most evil of adversaries, stick with it and know you’re not alone.