At the tender age of 44 I developed a testicle. My husband made the diagnosis. I didn’t feel particularly masculine — I had a few dark hairs around my nipples that I tweezed away (when I remembered), a peachy complexion like my mother (in other words, a soft blonde beard) and a good sexual appetite. Some might attribute the latter to a rise in testosterone, but I accepted it as a perk of being middle-aged, a genetic attempt to get me to produce a laat lammetjie before menopause.
I’d never had penis or scrotum envy — mostly because I didn’t really have much sensory experience of either until my early twenties — but it was quite pleasant to lie in the bath at night and finger my one ball in an absent-minded sort of way.
Apart from being situated in the nether region (on the panty line, jutting out at an angle to the pudendum), it wasn’t really like a testicle at all. It was more like those bee-sting breasts that sprouted when I was 12, without the nipple of course. A soft but firmish lump — except lumps have scary connotations, so I preferred to think of it as a bump.
The bump never interfered with our sex life (nothing like seven lean years of childbirth and breastfeeding to transform a turned-on wife into a goddess), although I did find manual pressure on the left side uncomfortable at times.
My husband said he liked my ball. It was how he would identify me if ever I were decapitated in a car crash.
But little by little it started to irritate me. It made cycling and horse-riding less appealing. I resorted to wearing board shorts in the gym and, of course, at the beach (if only they’d been around in my teens, I needn’t have been self-conscious about walking into the surf).
I know when I got the bump, although none of the doctors seem to accept my explanation. It started after a cold bikini wax 15 years ago while my regular beautician, our neighbour Fran, was away having chemotherapy.
The bump was tiny at first. Fran said another client had produced a similar protrusion at the hands of the same inexperienced stand-in beautician. But she told me not to worry: “All my lumps were always hard.” After she died I was too embarrassed to go to anyone else for a wax.
I showed my bump to the homeopath who has performed minor miracles in our family, curing glue ear and causing maternal funks to vanish. She asked us to measure it and we did — three times. It went from 1cm high and 3cm wide last September to 2,5cm wide two weeks later, before reverting to its former width. When a course of Thuja didn’t work, she said fat cells were difficult for the body to reabsorb. “If it’s worrying you, why don’t you have it cut out?”
I went for a pap smear to the unruffled GP who had seen me through two pregnancies and two Caesars; he gasped when he saw the size of the bump. But I was in fine health otherwise, he said, so there was no urgency to remove it. It took me a year to decide to get rid of my testicle. I was thinking about it too much. Soon I might start talking to it like Richard E Grant and his boil in How to Get Ahead in Advertising.
So I went to a plastic surgeon. I live in a small town and know three people the surgeon worked on to remove skin cancer, two women he’s given breast augmentations and one cancer survivor who received a reconstructed breast. I’ve been at a party where he’s talked about performing a clitoral reduction. I reckoned removing this bump should be a cinch.
And it was. A local anaesthetic, four injections (the worst part), a few snips and, he asked, “Do you want to look?” I had been preparing myself for a Guinness World Records horror of hair and teeth — perhaps a tiny twin brother. But it was a rather innocuous mixture of blood vessels and globs of yellow fat, like chicken fat. Ten dissolving stitches later, I was ready to go home.
When the anaesthetic wore off the pain wasn’t bad either. I took a couple of panados and arnica. Sitting down was slightly unpleasant for a few days — it gave me renewed respect for women who have had vaginal deliveries.
Laboratory tests confirmed that it was, as suspected, a litoma, a collection of fatty cells, a benign tumour.
I checked the damage with a mirror. The procedure had been a success. The testicle had gone. In its place was a longish, raised, inflamed scar, a bit like a smaller sewn-shut vagina. I was a woman again.