Matthew, United States

In April of 2000, shortly after I moved to Colorado to begin my first full-time professional job, I discovered a lump in my left testicle.

What followed was frustrating. For several weeks I struggled to get doctors to take it seriously. I was misdiagnosed more than once while the lump continued to grow. Over about fifteen days it tripled in size. Eventually I was referred to a urologist. Surgery followed, and the diagnosis came back as embryonal carcinoma, a form of testicular cancer.

I was put on an aggressive chemotherapy protocol using Bleomycin, Etoposide, and Platinol. For about two months I was in the clinic almost every weekday receiving chemotherapy through a port installed in my chest.

The treatment made me very sick.

However, spending full days having chemo nearly drove me crazy - I felt like I wasn't productive and I wasn't valuable during that time. Ultimately I brought my laptop with me to the clinic and worked during treatment, coding software for my job. When I went home in the evenings I usually collapsed, exhausted and sweating, curled up in a miserable little ball. It left me stinking of chemicals that I was sweating. I smelled like a hair salon where people were getting permanents in their hair.

The chemotherapy worked, but it left permanent reminders.

Today I live with hearing damage, neuropathy in my fingertips, and constant tinnitus in both ears. After treatment there were also years of monitoring and scans to make sure the cancer had not returned.

Looking back now, more than two decades later, cancer changed me in ways I did not expect.

When I was younger I could be rigid and impatient. I argued over small details and had a hard time letting things go. Going through cancer changed my sense of proportion.

When you are facing something that will absolutely kill you if untreated, you realise how much of the stress in everyday life comes from things that simply do not matter. Cancer forced me to let go of a lot of that.

It shifted my perspective and made me more flexible, more patient, and more aware of what is actually important.

No one would ever choose cancer.

But surviving it changed the way I live my life.