Testicular Self-Exam

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Narrator
What should I look for during a testicular self-exam?

Sheldon Marks, MD
There's the testicle itself, which should be like a firm, but not hard, egg-sized, almost thing. The epididymis, where the sperms mature and develop the ability to fertilize the egg, feels more like an earthworm attached to the bag. And there can be little tiny cysts and nodules that come off of that, and lumps and bumps. So it's essential that when you do a testicular self-exam that you get used to understanding what you're like. It's like women with a breast exams. You learn the lumps and bumps. Down there the guy needs to know what's normal, so if there is a change they can say, aha, this lump wasn't there last month. Uh, they should be doing an exam ideally once a month, in the shower when they're soapy and wet, and that will tell them what their normal baseline is. But our biggest problem in urology is that most men are diagnosed with testicular cancers late. They don't find them early when it's a little lump or bump. They wait until it's large or in the cases of some celebrities when it's already metastatic and advanced and they're showing signs of advanced disease.