If you count up every instance of utterance in the past seven days, you will find that I have said “testicle” and “vagina” more times in this past week than I have in my entire life. (And I am not, in even the slightest way, what you would call a prude.)

It’s just that this week my male and female worlds aligned (collided?) in such a way that these two words have populated 90 percent of my everyday conversation.

First, I was working with the Wunderbar women at Skirt! as they began their “Quest for Feminism” (you’ve got to check out the responses they’re getting in their video blogs!) which led me to read about V-Day (a movement to help stop violence against women) which led me to read about the celebrity-filled V to the 10^th anniversary performance of the Vagina Monologues in New Orleans -- with
Oprah Winfrey headlining the show…

OH! I have to digress here…Since my son and I are usually in the home “office” together in the afternoons, tapping away on our side-by-side computers, I showed him the video blogs on Skirt! and I tell him a little about the Feminist Movement of the 60s and 70s, which he had never really heard about [he’s 12, so I forgive him. And whose fault is it that he never heard about it, anyway?]

So he sees on my computer the title, “The Vagina Monologues” and I tell him a little about that, too. And I mention that Oprah will be performing a new monologue as part of the 10^th anniversary program to help stop violence against women. So I’m waiting for some profundity from my brilliant son, something deep and caring and Renaissance-man-ish, when he says,

“Mom, if Oprah is going to be in it, shouldn’t it be called the V-J-J Monologues?”

“What are you talking about?” I asked him, truly stupefied. (His turn to be stunned by a response he didn’t expect. One more thing his mom doesn’t know -- that Oprah Winfrey says “V-J-J” instead of vagina.) This is exactly what he tells me – “Everyone knows that’s what Oprah says instead of vagina.”

Apparently not everyone knows this. I can’t even imagine how my son knows this, since I’m pretty sure he has never seen an entire episode of Oprah. “It’s all over YouTube, Mom,” he says, with the unspoken “duh” dangling at the end of his sentence.

Okay then. Back from my digression.

So I’m using the word vagina all week long, talking about the V-Day movement, the money they’ve raised, the stories they’ve shared, the lives they’ve helped, and smack dab in the middle of all this, my boyfriend is diagnosed with testicular cancer. Yes, cancer showed up completely uninvited in one of his testicles and was found during a routine check-up (Thank G-d!) and so now we’re having conversations about testicles. We even say penis once in a while.

And, of course, we do what any couple facing a medical issue does today – we spend hours searching the Internet to understand the latest research, the implications, the treatments. And soon we are discussing testicles with our friends, neighbors and colleagues the way we used to discuss wine vintages (or in my case, beers).

I will digress again to let you know that my boyfriend had the surgery this week and it went extremely well – great results in the operating room and his CAT scan came back clear. I took him to my house to recover, thinking I’d be taking off work for a couple of days, running up and down the stairs to get him what he needed, interested to see how we wouldhandle this first bump in our 7-month-old relationship. Knowing my boyfriend only as optimistic, self-reliant, and, to quote my sullen pre-teen son, “he’s awfully perky,” I was curious to see if he would be like every other male patient I’ve ever seen, or for that matter, ever heard about (from their rightly-so complaining wives, girlfriends, mothers and sisters – in this I include myself).

You know what I’m talking about: the typical male patient that groans and moans and says, with complete seriousness, that giving birth could not possibly be anywhere NEAR as painful as the cold (or headache or backache or hangnail) that he currently has. The one that calls from the bed or couch 16 times an hour to ask if you would mind bringing him his water (coffee, newspaper, remote, socks, iPod) and would we please make sure his will (life insurance, living will, power of attorney) are up-to-date and makes you swear on his mother’s grave that his funeral will be a party to remember and NOT some sad affair with crying and “this is your life” eulogies. To which, by this time, you happily agree and let him know you will gladly arrange for said funeral immediately.

But much to my delight, my boyfriend actually follows the doctor’s orders and takes his pain medication and sleeps most of the first day. The next day he walks around a little bit, eats breakfast, reads his book, watches a movie, sleeps some more. He never once moans or asks me to see the bandage or insists on comparing pain levels. By the third morning he’s taking the stairs, making coffee, answering office emails, cracking jokes with my son – I swear he even took out the trash!

Is my boyfriend an anomaly, or was he always a quietly capable, buoyant and helpful patient? I begin to wonder if they removed some (other) male genetic material along with his testicle, some X/Y chromosome thing that is responsible for the legendary male-pattern recovery process… I told my son to watch and learn; that his wife would someday thank him for being a kinder, gentler, sub-martyrpatient, when he refuses to announce that he has “the worst cold in the world” and “his head is about to explode” and “Honey, I was there; believe me, your 12-hour delivery was nothing compared to this.”Not that I wish my son will ever need his wife to wait on him hand and foot for anything, but just in case he should happen to get a blister, I’m glad he has now seen how one man can actually make it through without uttering what would be really funny if he didn’t actually believe it, as he stands near the grave of his recently-buried colleague and announces: “I have what he had, only I have it worse.”

Well, I have digressed on my digressions here, more than once, I’m afraid, because I wanted to talk about why saying “testicle” and “vagina” are so unusual for most of us. It is, in fact, one of the reasons that Eve Ensler, the playwright/author of The Vagina Monologues, took her show on the road. She felt that the mere fact that people are reluctant to use the correct word for that part of the female anatomy – not in everyday conversation, maybe, but with our own daughters and nieces and sisters and mothers and brothers and husbands – that this reluctance implied some sort of shame that she (we) felt. She said she created The Vagina Monologues to “dispel that attitude, to inspire women’s dignity and safety.”

Now, 4,000 shows later and $50 million dollars raised for safe women’s programs across the world, in every city in the U.S., and on hundreds of our college campuses, I can only hope the performances of real women’s stories, and the upcoming anniversary performance will inspire and improve the lives of women everywhere, and give us all power to say – with strength, wisdom and dignity -- “Have you ever had a Brazilian wax for your, you know … V-J-J?”

UPDATE: Well, our days of talking about testicles may be short-lived --AND THAT’S A GOOD THING! Sean’s path report came back just the way you’d want it to -- “curable” cell type, excellent prognosis, no chemo at this time (possibly some radiation). His doc said he had amazing healing powers and a great attitude. We told him it was all of you, your positive vibes and strong prayers. Thank you!