Live Younger Longer

My story
In the early 1980s, I was a 20-something who had the world by the tail. In
my fourth year of medical school at the University of Texas in Houston, I
was ready to travel the country, doing monthlong rotations at different
medical institutions. This process, common for medical students in their
final year, was going to help me figure out where I eventually would want
to train. I had an amazing first month in Rochester, Minnesota, at Mayo
Clinic, then moved on to the University of California, Los Angeles.
A few days after arriving in LA, I felt a testicular lump. The lump was hard
and painless — red flags of a cancerous growth. A biopsy confirmed that I
had a form of testicular cancer called seminoma. Testicular cancer is one of
the top five causes of death in young men. Fortunately, in my case, my

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cancer didn’t appear to have spread, which greatly increased my chance of
survival.
I returned to Houston for treatment, undergoing six weeks of radiation at
MD Anderson Cancer Center. As any cancer patient will tell you, treatment
weeks can feel more like months. Those six weeks did indeed feel like six
months. As a side effect of my radiation therapy, I was sleeping 16 hours a
day. The days and nights went by in a blur.
But I was young and looked at the whole episode as a bump in the road,
something that wouldn’t affect me much over the long run. I was ready to
put it all behind me and forge ahead with my career in medicine.
My primary doctor at the time said he felt that my experience with cancer
would change my career path — maybe even make me want to go into a
cancer treatment field. But I thought to myself, there’s no chance this will
deter me from my cardiology goal.
I ended up spending three years training in internal medicine at Mayo
Clinic and stayed there to complete cardiology training. I realized how
fortunate I was to spend that early month at Mayo Clinic as a fourth-year
medical student before my cancer was found. If I had planned on visiting
Mayo Clinic even a month later, I’m sure I wouldn’t have made that visit.
My time at Mayo Clinic was life changing. Watching medical teams work
together to do everything in their power to help patients — I felt like few
institutions did it as well as Mayo Clinic did. And after being a cancer
patient, that was something I could appreciate.
During this time I also married my wife, Linda, and we had our first child,
Emily. Once training was complete, our little family left for Texas to fulfill

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my dream of practicing with my father. But the pull of Mayo Clinic
remained. Two years after returning to San Antonio, we were on our way
back to Mayo Clinic, where I took a position as a cardiologist. Our family
eventually grew to three children and life was good.
When I was 39, I found another lump, which turned out to be testicular
cancer again. But this time was very different. This was a more aggressive
form called embryonal carcinoma, and it had spread to my lungs and other