The BENU Hallowed Harvest is a great “sorry you have cancer” gift

i mean, i appreciated it

Hi guys, how has your fall been? Mine has been eventful: first I got testicular cancer and then I got this pen!

This is the BENU Hallowed Harvest, a limited-edition Halloween/fall-themed pen based on BENU’s Euphoria body.¹

The Hallowed Harvest is a black-and-orange resin pen with some fairly subdued orange sparkles in it. The black resin anchors the pen at top and bottom in a way that makes the abstract swirls of orange really stand out, like that bright splotrch on the ultrasound of your testicle where your doctor is like (serious voice) “yes this is cancer” but without the cancer part.

The Euphoria is a bigger pen in the BENUverse and I think it’s most similar to the Tattoo (middle) in size and weighting. If you feel like the Talisman (left) is a little small for you, this one should work just fine.

That said, it’s pretty lightweight. This is good if you have to lay on your back for a couple weeks because of surgery as it will let you write from a prone position without having to constantly fight the pen.

The nib is a #6 Schmidt; as I have learned to expect from BENU, it wrote incredibly well out of the box. The cap seals really well and keeps the nib wet, which is generally convenient but will be especially useful if you find yourself in a groin-wound situation where walking twenty steps to the kitchen to clean the nib would be a journey to Mordor.

I got this pen as a “feel better” gift and have really enjoyed using it. While the colors are definitely fall-inspired, they’re not so HALLOWEEEEEN!!! that it feels weird to use it after October, which is good because half of this October was spent just laying down and being like ughhhhhhhh wife please bring me more ramen.

All-in, this pen is a great way to say “I’m sorry about your genital cancer” to the fountain pen lover in your life and I strongly recommend it. You can buy it at many retailers, including Hey Figure It Out Yourself (You’re An Adult).

A Movember PSA, illustrated (nothing gross)

Movember is where guys grow mustaches in November for men’s health awareness. This all makes sense if you know the history of it or are just familiar with Australian slang, but otherwise can be understood as simply better branding than “groin cancer month” as two of its focuses are testicular and prostate cancer.

we are looking for a drummer

We’re gonna talk about the former.

Testicular cancer is part of cancer’s mid-range line and is an accessible entry point for those looking to get into the more serious cancers but not yet ready for one of the really scary ones. It’s a pretty big step up from entry-level models like those non-melanoma skin cancers, but with survival and cure rates north of 95% it’s still a long ways off from top-shelf stuff like colorectal cancer.

Undoubtedly the funniest cancer,² testicular cancer is common enough that they know exactly how to treat it but uncommon enough that you are unlikely to actually get it. Like many cancers, it is caused by ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.³ If you do get it, your experience will vary depending on how early you caught it and how quickly you went to the doctor.

I discovered mine in early September and my first impression out-of-the-box was “AHHHH I’M GONNA DIE.” I went to the doctor the next day, had a ultrasound, and found out within a week that I most likely had cancer.

At that point the tumor was about 1.4 cm, which is very small unless of course it is your body and then literally any size of cancer merits GET IT OUT GET IT OUT GET IT OUT. Here is a picture I drew of it right after I got the initial test results and was trying to wrap my mind around how big that was.

i give myself a D- for the name

The treatment was a radical orchiectomy, which is the surgery I alluded to in an earlier post. AND YES, I KNOW: it sounds exciting but as it turns out “radical” does not mean the doctor will perform the procedure on a skateboard, no matter how nicely you ask.

i’m pretty proud of this one

Because mine was caught so early, my surgery was way better than I was expecting. The cancer had not spread and I don’t need chemo or radiation unless it comes back; my odds there are also very good.⁴ I do need five years of CT scans and those carry an increased risk of me getting a different cancer a couple decades from now, but whatever—I’m probably going to be eaten by an alligator by then so NICE TRY CANCER.⁵

This makes it weird to talk about because in the grand scheme of things it feels like a real non-event. There are many people who battle heavy-duty cancer for a long time, and catching a highly curable cancer at stage 1A feels like some real bush-league stuff by comparison.⁶

That said, the reason I caught it at stage 1A is because I knew a guy at church who had survived it, and years ago he impressed on me the importance of checking for it and immediately seeing a doctor if anything ever felt weird. My strong suspicion is that I would have otherwise noticed it much later—I never had any pain, so it was literally just “whoa that feels weird.”

And after that, let’s be honest: I most likely would have taken the “it’ll probably go away and talking to the doctor about your genitals is embarrassing so let me ignore this for a while” approach, which would have meant I’d be typing this post while stuck in bed after a much more painful surgery, shopping online for cool hats so I’d be prepared when the chemo kicked in.

I would have most likely lived either way, but the path to normal looks a lot different. It’s one thing to have an outpatient surgery and get CT scans at stage 1A; it’s another to have to also go through a whole bunch of chemo because it has spread to your abdomen and lungs. I am grateful that I had the much easier path, and I’m passing it on so you can feel like your experience with it, if you ever have one, is kind of a non-event too.⁷

So check your stuff regularly in the shower; I did once a week. It takes about five seconds, and the familiarity with what they normally feel like will let you identify when a steel ball bearing magically appears inside one of them seemingly overnight.⁸ And if that happens, GO TO THE DOCTOR IMMEDIATELY. It’s not foolproof but boy, was it worth it for me.

Anyway, all of this threw off my normal writing cadence, so I’m going to be on a more irregular writing schedule for at least a bit while I have some travel—subscribe (it’s free) if you want to get notified for the next one (or don’t! I do this for fun!). Bye!

1. i know this is two BENU posts in a row sorry i will try to schedule my cancer gifts a little better in the future

2. i mean no one wins America’s Funniest Home Videos by getting hit in the pancreas

3. actually the cause is excessive handsomeness but we’re not supposed to say that or everyone would want it

4. whether or not you get chemo/radiation depends on (1) how early you catch it and (2) what type of testicular cancer you get. You won’t know what type you have until after surgery, so if you want at least a chance at avoiding that stuff it pays to act quickly

5. the alligator may then give birth to mutant megagators as a consequence of all the radiation i’ll have in me but that’s kind of a “you” problem at that point sooooo good luck

6. in addition, it’s weird because i have largely positive feelings about the whole thing. while i can’t exactly recommend testicular cancer (hurts, costs money, might die), i did feel such an unexplainable amount of peace and calm and closeness to God during the experience that part of me was sad when the pathology results were better than i expected and “normal” life came back

7. also because I originally expected I would need chemo based on my age and benefitted greatly from Writing At Large blogging about that; just reading about the routine of chemo made it a lot less scary when i was trying to process it and not yet ready to talk about it in person (thank you)

8. i don’t know if this is what it’s like for everyone, but because i’d been routinely checking for years it was unbelievably obvious when something was wrong