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Comment by PH95VuimJjqBqy | Hacker News Reader

am I missing something? You originally said testicular cancer, now you're describing cancer in the chest.

Many cancer cells travel around the body. The cells may only attach and grow in certain kinds of tissue, but that isn't always the case. At a basic level, cancer is mutated cells...sometimes they mutate more.

I had seminoma testicular cancer. If you must have one, it's what you want. It's very treatable, but also affects the lymphatic system of the body. I had tumors in one testicle and 2 lymph nodes in my abdomen.

Surgery for the testicular tumor, chemo for the others.

sure, but in that case I would expect someone to say cancer rather than specifically testicular cancer.

It's not that important, it just struck me that something was missing in the description.

It is specifically a testicular cancer. The cell type originates in the testicle. It’s a germ cell which are only found in reproductive organs. In my case doctors don’t really know why it “starts in the chest”. Some think it starts in the testes, moves up into the chest and the testes clear up. But there is no definitive science pointing to that. It is very rare. But it is definitely a type of testicular cancer. A rather shitty one unfortunately.

heh, ok. I always assumed testicular cancer meant cancer in the testes, what I'm hearing you say is that it's a type of cancer that starts in the testes so it's considered testicular cancer regardless of where it's found.

that makes sense, thank you for the explanation.

Sometimes it starts in the testes, but in extremely rare cases they believe that it is of primordial origin. For example, when you are developing as an embryo, perhaps the germ cell gets stuck in the chest and takes many years to mutate. But they don’t really know how this works. Very weird stuff.

gotcha, thank you for the education. I wasn't aware that could happen, definitely weird.

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