(Quite Literally) Talking Bollocks

Well, it's been a couple of days since I've posted anything, and it recently occurred to me it's been quite a while since I posted anything personal, so I thought I'd share something from my past. This is a supportive environment, right?

The following is entirely true, but - as is so often the case with my life - a mix of stupidity and more serious matters. I don't know if I'd go so far as to say it was a blend of comedy and tragedy, that's for you to decide.

Anyway.

It’s fairly rare for me to have a bath. Don't worry, I'm not grubby (I shower at least once a day), but as I'm over six feet tall, it's often difficult to find a bath which allows me to fully lie down - by which I mean I usually have to decide whether it'll be knees or shoulders and upwards out of the water. Neither of which is ideal. But, one Thursday evening about ten years ago, I was sharing a flat with a friend in Hackney Wick, East London, and as she was out, I thought I'd have a nice hot bath to see if it was as relaxing as all the adverts seem so keen to suggest.

It wasn't very relaxing, as it turned out - though that was less to do with the temperature or the bubble bath I used, and more to do with the fact that, as I was washing in the general groinal area, I felt something which I'd never felt before. No, I don't mean a sense of shame or self-loathing, I'm all too used to that, but my hand passed over something in the scrotal regional which felt out of place. The bath was warm, but my stomach suddenly felt cold - one of those sudden chilling clenches in the gut, like when you realise you left your keys in the house.

I checked again, and there was no doubt about it - on the side of one of my testicles, towards the back, was something that felt oddly hard (don't make the obvious comment, this is the serious part of the story, okay?), like a small pea. It didn't feel right, and I'd never felt it before. Shaken, I hurriedly got out of the bath and dried off, and said nothing about it to my flatmate (or anyone else, for that matter). It felt too big and scary to discuss, and somehow as if it would become more real if the words were said aloud. I slept, but not well.

The next day, Friday, I booked a session to see my doctor. The appointment was for Monday morning before work, which unfortunately left me a solid weekend in which to dwell on it. We lived opposite Victoria Park, and looking out of my window as I mulled the possibility of something being seriously wrong, I remembered how Dennis Potter, when he was aware that he was dying of cancer, said that the blossom on the tree outside his window was "the whitest, frothiest, blossomiest blossom" ever. It being late winter, the trees I was looking at remained steadfastly bare-armed, but I could see what he meant. It felt like one of those “if I turn out to be okay, I'll do all those things I keep putting off” moments. Well, more a series of moments, really; a whole weekend of them.

Monday morning arrived, and I went to see the doctor. He worked in the Wick Health Centre - named after the area, of course, but somehow it seemed only fitting. I entered his office, and explained, and he nodded and asked me to drop my trousers. Reasonable enough, given the issue on my mind, but it had been a bit of a 'dry spell' that year (future biographers will probably suggest it was an extension of the same 'dry spell' I'd experienced in the years since birth, but that's a discussion for another time), and as a straight chap I was slightly disappointed that the first hands in years that were willing to touch my gonads were the hands of a middle-aged man. Still, testicle-lump-worriers can't be choosers and all that, so I stood by his examination bench, my trousers and underwear spooled around my ankles, and he examined my genitals.

You may have read in scary books about how a man's scrotum retracts when he's afraid, and it's true that happens - and it certainly occurred that morning, as I was scared he might say that, yes, there is a lump, and it's probably cancerous, so everything was pretty shrunken down there. Then again, it was a winter morning as well, and as I wasn't actually looking to impress the doc with my package, but just to get a diagnosis, I put that out of my mind as he checked where I explained I'd found the lump.

"Well," he said eventually, "I can't find anything wrong."

"No?" I asked, as I pulled up my trousers. "Nothing ?"

"No, nothing abnormal at all."

"Oh, good," I said, but that was an understatement. I felt as if the sun had broken through the clouds, and I was being given the chance to get on with my life.

"I'll put a note on your records, but I don't think there's anything to worry about," he said, and as good as his word, he added the day's date and a brief description of the session to my medical record card; nothing abnormal detected - or, to quote the all-too appropriate acronym he used, NAD.

I picked up a leaflet on self-examination from the waiting room as I left, and made my way off to work. As I waited for the bus, I read the leaflet, which stressed the importance of chaps checking themselves regularly, which is only sensible; part of the instructions, though, urged men not to get worried and think they had a lump when they had in fact isolated the epididimus (basically, the point where the tubes join the back of the balls). As I read further, I realised that was exactly what I'd done, and was annoyed with myself - for want of a bit of basic biological knowledge, I'd convinced myself that this was definitely it: I was going to die soon, and that I'd never get to climb mountains or woo fair maidens or write novels or anything.

Mind you, I seem to have a fundamental problem with remembering that my testicles are actually attached to my body by tubes; some years earlier, bored and inspired by watching someone on TV skilfully rotating those shiny steel 'stress balls', I'd tried to do the same with my own balls. I haven't attempted such a thing since, mind - I learnt a swift and painful lesson that day on the non-swappable nature of my nads.

Though, given the above tale, it was and is painfully obvious to me now that, in the matter of the human body, it is as the Buddhists say: everything is connected.