Jonathan's Story

A few days after Christmas 2005, Jonathan was diagnosed with Testicular Cancer. At that stage, he was unaware of whether the cancer had spread beyond his testicle, but the first port of call was to remove the cancerous testicle as soon as possible. This operation took place on 24th January 2006 in Weston General Hospital.

Later tests showed up that the cancer had spread to Jonathan's abdominal lymph nodes - the predicted path of testicular cancer once it spreads. This meant that Jonathan would have to undergo 3 cycles of chemotherapy, each cycle being 4 days in hospital and a further couple of weeks at home to recuperate. Chemotherapy started at the end of February and finished in the middle of April.

In May, Jonathan was told that he would have to have major surgery to remove a tumour in his abdominal lymph node which the chemotherapy didn't eradicate. At this point, the doctors did not know whether this tumour was dead or alive, but it needed to be taken out.

Jonathan's operation at The Royal Marsden Hospital in Fulham, was scheduled to take place at the end of May. Unfortunately, he came down with a heavy cold, and his operation had to be postponed for 5 weeks, until July 4th 2006. The operation finally came round and went very successfully. Having had 5 extra weeks to recuperate from the chemotherapy, he recovered from major surgery extremely quickly, and was discharged from hospital in under a week, astonishing everyone!

The results from the operation were as positive as could be expected - the tumour taken out, although the size of a Cadbury's Crème egg, had in fact been killed by the chemotherapy, and all of Jonathan's blood tests looked clear.

On October 6th, Jonathan had results from his final scans which officially put him in remission after a long and arduous year for him and his family.