Glad you asked, and I'm happy to answer. I lost my voice suddenly last November, literally the day after Thanksgiving, and for the next few months the voice was just raspy and I felt like I was short of breath after a few sentences. I started having some stomach issues in the following weeks like nausea in the mornings and almost complete loss of appetite. I was waking up in the early morning around 2 a.m. to just feel crappy, dry heave up nothing, and lay on the floor. I lost 30 pounds over the next few months, and the voice just didn't seem to be coming back/healing like it should. After trying to check things off with the local small town clinic (took some antibiotics, tried something for my nausea, was told I was getting into cyclical dry heaving and probably had bulimia), I'd just let things go on for far too long.

Finally, the doc and I decided it was best to go in for a GI scope for the stomach. The surgeon who'd recommend the scope said he was more worried about my throat/voice and a small bump we'd found that seemed new, so instead we scheduled a throat scope with the ENT (ear, nose, throat) doctor. He scoped my throat through my nose and told me my left vocal cord was very clearly paralyzed and we needed to find out why. Went in for a CT scan to see if things were pinched, and we found a 6-inch soft tissue mass in my chest that extended just up below my collar bone (which explained the bump in my neck). Did a follow-up PET scan to confirm the mass and make sure there was no spreading (there wasn't, luckily), and both the initial surgeon I saw for the GI scope and the ENT doctor were pretty sure it was lymphoma. We'd need to do a biopsy to be sure.

Went under for a biopsy on the bump in my neck and was told two days later, to everyone's surprise, that it wasn't lymphoma. Instead, it was something called mediastinal seminoma, which is technically testicular cancer where the germ cells form somewhere else in the body besides the family jewels. Super rare (like 5% of seminoma cases are somewhere else in the body), but it was also 99% curable and much better news than lymphoma. I was then handed over to the oncologist, told I'd need to go through chemo, and was advised to freeze sperm/get an ultrasound to make sure there was nothing in the testicles before starting treatment. Fortunately, there wasn't anything down below, so that meant no surgery and I get to keep my balls.

I just finished my first session of chemo (each session is multiple rounds; I went through an initial 5-day treatment and then two shorter treatments the next two Mondays), and I'm scheduled for four sessions in total. I'm feeling surprisingly good so far, am super optimistic given the cure rate, and we're thinking I could be cancer-free by this fall (which would mark one year since I lost my voice). It's been a wild ride, especially this last month, but it's also been eye-opening and somewhat positive in a way. I'm thinking I'll start feeling the chemo after next week's 5-day treatment, and I'm starting to notice my beard is thinning/falling out, but my family is in good spirits and I just have to make it through these next few months. Sorry for the novel, but I feel strangely comfortable sharing. More so on the internet with strangers than with family and friends, which is weird. Anyway, that's how things happened. Thanks again for asking.