A friend of my boyfriend is going in next week for a biopsy. I’m getting this all second-hand so forgive me if I don’t have all the details right. As I understand from what FoBF told BF, the surgeon is going to remove the entire affected testicle because doing a biopsy without removing the testicle will cause the cancer, if present, to spread. A Google search doesn’t turn up anything specifically on point but it seems strange to me as an non-medical person that the surgeon couldn’t biopsy the tissue without removing the entire testicle and only remove it if the biopsy results are positive. What’s the Straight Dope on biopsying a trsticle?
From what I’ve known of people with testicular cancer, doctors almost always remove the affected testicle. It’s pretty easy for a doctor (or a layman) to detect any abnormality.
You only need one testicle anyway and if there is cancer, it is highly curable.
Of course, guys like to have both of their closest friends with them at all time.
When my husband had a “bump” on one of his testicles, the first step was to sonogram the area to see if there was, indeed, a growth. When one actually was found, the doctor used a hypodermic to remove fluid from the growth for tests. In our case, it came back as being a harmless cyst. The doctor said nothing about removal of the testicle, but I assume that would have been the next step if the test results had been bad.
My doctor told us in the intitial phase that even if it did turn out to be cancerous, testicular cancer is the “best” cancer you can have, even if it has spread throughout the body. She said that this cancer responded very well to treatment, and that his chances of beating it were very high.
The problem with a lot of men is that they don’t have small, strange lumps checked out as quickly as they should. When I was doing research to find out more, I found the story of one poor young guy who only went to the doctor once his tumor was the size of a golf ball. (He survived.) Apparently, lumps in the genitals strike horror into the hearts of some men, and they ignore it, hoping it will go away. As with any cancer, the sooner the treatment begins, the better the chances of full recovery.