Warming Up

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Five years ago today I lost my testicle. To be fair I was keeping track of it until someone filled me with anaesthetic and nicked it. Anyway, I won't say any more, as I don't like to talk about it.

Funnily enough I spent the anniversary of my gonad removal back at the Lister hospital - having a slightly less severe procedure. My white blood platelets are a bit low and they want to have a look at my bone marrow to see what's wrong. It seems unfair that once you've had cancer you are not then immortal, but you can still get other illnesses.

Having milked the testicle for half a decade, there's a part of me hoping it's something serious so I can get another book and show out of it, but there's probably a bigger part of me hoping it will be easy to deal with.

I am feeling well and wouldn't have known anything was up at all if it wasn't for my annual trip to my oncologist. As I've said since this happened, in many ways it's lucky to have had this light cancer, as it means I get a yearly MOT (even though my rear bumper is a bit knackered). If there's anything wrong I will know about it much quicker than I would have done.

Having your bone marrow extracted is not very pleasant. I actually had this done a few times, ten or so years ago, when I had another mild scare about blood tests and the possibility of nasty cells in my body. They kept an eye on me for a few years, but nothing seemed to happen.

I couldn't remember much about the extraction process from back then, apart from the fact it was uncomfortable. Today I had three extremely lovely medical professionals looking after me and they did a fantastic job of making this as painless as possible: warning me when it was going to hurt, keeping me chatting so I could keep my mind off having stuff sucked out of my hip bone, apologising and calling me sweetheart whenever I got a pang of pain.

We talked about Park Run, how I made money from being a comedian, whether I got nervous on stage (I told them I was much more nervous now than I'd ever be whilst performing), my testicle removal (even though I hate to talk about it) and our kids. It made lying on my side on a paper sheet on a little bed with my knees up against my chest and my bum partly showing, somehow a less awkward situation. I was facing the wall most of the time and I can barely remember what any of them looked like, but man, the people who work for the NHS are good people.

They didn't get enough fluid on the first go, but were very pleased with the marrow they got out, one saying she loved it when it came out like that (I wish I could have seen how that was), so we had another go at the liquid.

It wasn't as much fun as having a ball removed as there was no morphine (though I had taken a couple of paracetamol, so still got to have some drugs), but it was probably less psychologically disturbing. I had sweated a bit, proving my nervousness. They patched me up and I thanked them for taking stuff out of my bones and off I went.

I was in mild discomfort occasionally through the day, but got on with doing a Newsround and some more work on one of my new book/podcast ideas.

On heading over to the annexe for the first time I'd been struck with how hot it was and thought that something had gone wrong with my radiator timer (which I had turned off). It was 31 degrees in there. It turned out that I had left my underdesk electric heater on for the entire time I was in Cheddar. I was sweating like Prince Andrew in a police car or Richard Herring getting some bone marrow extracted and feel pretty lucky that this didn't cause the building to burn down and the death of all my puppets. I would have laughed, but I was too terrified by the thought of what it must have cost to turn my office into a green house for the best part of a week. If global warming goes over the threshold then I will have to hold up my hands and admit it's my fault.