Last year, Sal Gomez noticed he felt pain in his right testicle and lower back. The third-year medical student thought maybe he pulled a muscle while working or exercising. When the pain didn’t go away, he visited his doctor and learned the reason for his ache: He had testicular cancer.
“We should talk about it more because it’s the most common cancer, although rare, in young men,” he says. “You’re in the prime of your life.”After 12-hour days in the hospital as a medical student in a surgical rotation and then studying all night, Gomez thought when he first felt the pain in his testicle and back that he had pulled a muscle.
“When you learn about testicular cancer, you learn symptoms like a lump,” he says. “You really don’t think about cancer being painful. You usually think of a pea-sized lump a testicle that’s not painful but maybe has some kind of enlargement.”“Pain really shouldn’t be coming and going,” Gomez says. “I did another exam, and at the time, I didn’t feel a lot there.”“There are not really many benign tumors in the testicle, and mine looked particularly cancerous,” he says. “I was really surprised.
Even after chemotherapy, Sal Gomez's lymph nodes looked enlarged. He underwent an 8-hour-long procedure to have some removed.The size of his lymph nodes was a worrying discovery because testicular often moves into the kidneys, Gomez says. But fortunately additional scans revealed that it hadn't spread.