Hey maddermax,
Just to introduce myself, I'm AmandaC's husband and I had testicular cancer about 18 months ago.
Sorry to hear about your son, especially being a 2-timer. Its a rare disease to begin with its extremely rare to get it twice. Having said that I know a guy who had 3 seperate occurances by the age of 30. The third one happened because he was left with half a testicle after the second occurance. The doctors figured it would be good to leave him with some testicular tissue so he wouldn't have to rely on testosterone shots so much... and they were wrong (3rd time round he had a stage 3 non-seminoma too... not good). I've heard they don't consider that option very often anymore.
Anyway, it sounds like your son has had his second orchidectamy and your waiting to see an endo to get his hormones sorted out? the spot on his lung might just be a large lymp node or blood vessel. Testicular cancer, especially seminomas which it sounds like your son had, spread in a very predictable way, from the testicles to lymp nodes in the pelvis and adomen and rarely beyond that. From my understanding, its unheard of for it to jump from the testicles to the lungs or above. A friend of mine actually had a similar situaion (without the cancer though). He had to have a lung scan prior to emigrating from America to Australia and they found a spot on his lung that looked a bit dodgy. It was in a very difficult location (next to big arteries) and it took a very complex and expensive operation for him to have it biopsied. It turned out to be nothing, just a naturally big lymph node apparently... shame that he had to pay $40K american to find that out. Luckily our health system isn't like that.
It must be a tough time for your son waiting for the endo. You'd think that sort of thing would be sorted out fairly quickly, but the hospital system always manages to suprise me. I actually chose to go through the public health system where I live because the private hospital wanted me to wait several months for one of their oncologists to get back from holidays. I thought the public hospital was great in comparison.
However, I had several operations at another public hospital which wsan't so great. Those guys tried to talk me out of getting a prosthesis inserted too, using the excuse that there was a 2 percent chance it could get infected (really). I asked what would happen if it did get infected and they said 'you'd need antibiotics', 'really bad antibiotics' I asked... 'no just regular pescription stuff' !?!. I was 3 months out of chemo at that stage and very healthy, so the risk didn't faze me much. But the fact I had to argue for it did, considering that I was also told they were removing the testicle for 'academic reasons' (my cancer didn't originate in my regular testicles, but the only way to be 100% sure of that was to take a very slightly dodgy looking one out and dissect it). I figured the least they could do for that is give me a prosthesis.
Anyway, sorry for rambling on. What I orignally intended to do was tell you about www.tc-cancer.com which you and/or your son might find very handy. The website has forums with a dedicated group of really supportive people including mums, dads, wives and girlfriends of testicular cancer sufferers. There is a dedicated forum for '2x warriors' and guys that need artificial testosterone. Your son might find not want to open up to anyone on the site, but it might help him just to read other peoples stories and there are people just like him on that site. You might find it handy too, some of the most active people on the site are parents and partners.
Good luck with everything.
Steve
