Cancer, Diverticulitis and Dentures ~ an Unlikely Trio

World Traveller Series II: Events & Incidents ~ Episode 7

by Brett Hayhoe

Testicles are weird things.

They react to the slightest change in temperature. They get upset easily, and with very little provocation. Which is why, shortly after moving from tropical north Queensland to the considerably less tropical climate of Victoria, the fact that mine swelled to approximately the size of an orange did not immediately alarm me. There was no pain. The working theory was that they simply didn’t like the cold. A reasonable hypothesis, under the circumstances.

About a week later, the opposite occurred. With excruciating pain.

The Orange, the Oncologist, and the Shaking Hands

A rushed appointment with a local GP. An immediate referral to a scanning facility for an ultrasound. The word pain requires some revision at this point — because whatever I had understood pain to mean prior to the moment a doctor applied an ultrasound device to a very hard, very swollen, very unhappy testicle, it was insufficient preparation for the actual experience.

The tests were inconclusive. I was referred to an oncologist.

His offices were in Toorak — no insult intended to Toorak. He was a little old man who laid me on his examination table with hands that shook visibly, speech that was slow and deliberate, and a manner that suggested he had delivered this particular variety of news many times before. What he said was this:

Son, if you had private health insurance, you’d be on the operating table tomorrow morning and I’d be removing that testicle.

The response came quickly and with considerable conviction: with all due respect, Sir, your hands are not getting anywhere near my family jewels.

I was admitted to the Monash Medical Centre in Clayton, where a wonderful oncologist removed the cancerous testicle without incident. What followed was six weeks of intense chemotherapy, hair loss, the packing of the scrotum, and all the attendant indignities that chemotherapy visits upon a person.

The testicle — and, it turned out, the cancer — was gone. That part of the story ends well. What chemotherapy left behind, however, would take considerably longer to resolve.

But before the cancer — and this requires a brief journey backwards in time — there was the small matter of Valentine’s Day.

The Day That Required Ten Carving Knives

I had not had surgery of any serious kind until I was thirty. For a week prior to Valentine’s Day that year, I had been complaining of constipation and an inability to find any relief. My middle-eldest sister had provided tablets. The tablets did not work.

On the morning of Valentine’s Day itself, performing the morning’s ablutions, a new kind of pain arrived in the stomach. The closest available description: being stabbed simultaneously by ten carving knives, with no relief whatsoever, and no indication that relief was coming.

What followed requires a particular acknowledgment of a personal quality that does not always serve its owner well but on this occasion almost certainly saved a life: I am, as those who know me will confirm, quite anally retentive. This meant that despite being unable to stand, unable to see, and operating at a level of pain that defies adequate description, I was able to crawl to the phone and dial my sister.

She answered. She came. She took me to the Cairns Base Hospital.

I can tell you, from that morning, exactly what everyone was wearing on their feet. Nothing above that registered at all.

What followed was poking, prodding, relentless pain, and the signing of waivers. I woke the following morning to find a bag of some description attached to my side.

The doctor — who had been present the previous morning — was there when I woke. He said that on initial examination it could have been the appendix, or something more serious.

I asked which it was.

He said: well, the good news is it’s not your appendix.

I said: ok wise arse, what is it then?

He went into graphic detail about diverticulitis, and the colostomy bag now hanging from my side. On arrival the previous morning, internal leaking had given my life expectancy approximately half an hour. The emergency surgery had resolved that. The bag was a precaution — to ensure no further internal leaking while things settled. Under normal circumstances I would not have been fitted with one, but emergency surgery and normal circumstances are not natural companions.

A crash course followed on the care and management of a stoma. Then I was sent home.

The worst thing about a colostomy bag is getting shoes to match.

One genuine advantage: the savings on toilet paper are significant.

The Teeth — Chemotherapy’s Parting Gift

Back to the cancer treatment. The timeline is hazy in places — chemotherapy has a way of softening the edges of memory — but the results are crystal clear.

Chemotherapy caused the bone structure in my mouth to disintegrate. The teeth began to fall out without provocation. The dentist’s assessment was unambiguous: all of them needed to go, to prevent infections that would compound an already complicated situation.

Over several months, the teeth were meticulously extracted. The upper front row required four injections into the soft palate to adequately deaden the area. What I called the dentist at that particular moment would take this episode from its current classification to something considerably more restricted. That information will not be shared here.

The dentist removed the entire upper row but left four teeth on the bottom, requiring a partial denture. The four remaining bottom teeth, as if unwilling to be left behind indefinitely, eventually fell out as well. This left me without teeth or adequate dentures for over three years — until a magnificent dentist by the name of Dr. Adam arrived in the story and fitted a full replacement set, top and bottom.

Three Years, and What They Cost

Every parent, for the entirety of every child’s life, should repeat themselves until the message is genuinely received: look after your teeth. Look after your lungs. These are not negotiable. They affect parts of the body not obviously associated with them, in ways that become apparent only after the damage is done.

For three years, I avoided photographs. I covered my mouth when I laughed. I smiled as little as possible in public, and when I did, I was conscious of every moment of it. The word for what those three years felt like is diminished — a specific, daily, grinding diminishment that does not announce itself dramatically but simply sits alongside everything else, colouring it slightly darker.

Dentures come with their own accompanying cast of inconveniences: ulcers, the nightly removal and cleaning, the occasional social awkwardness of a life lived with removable teeth. None of that is insignificant.

But the self-esteem that a full set of teeth restores — the ability to laugh without thinking, to smile without covering, to exist in a photograph without dread — is worth every second of pain involved in getting there, and every cent spent on Dr. Adam’s very considerable skills.

Some things, it turns out, are worth the cost of recovering them.

A smile is one of them.

The World Traveller Series II: Events & Incidents is written and produced by Brett Hayhoe — publisher, editor and administrator of Q Magazine.

Read more at Q Magazine Blogs — Ask Brett Podcasts & YouTube — Ask Brett Podcasts | Hayhoe Channel