My oncologist says that he is very, very confident that the nodule has not spread anywhere. He is also certain that it is primary and told that it has nothing to do with the tumor in my testicle. According to him, it's very ordinary lung cancer. He says that when you think rationally about my case, there is no way that the lung cancer would've spread to my testicle when it was sub 2mm size 2 years ago.

As for my CEA, which I measured on Monday: It had gone up by 1,2 ug/l since my last measurement (it's 9,8 ug/l now). Oncologist told me to stop doing these measurements unsupervised (i.e. without doctors referral) as they are very nonspecific. He said that the value of CEA is to monitor effect of treatment where the CEA is like 400 or 500 and it goes to 50. The CEA can go up in all kinds of inflammations and other things. So now I've started thinking that maybe I have diabetes or pre-diabetes or some kind liver damage. At the time when my CEA started rising, I had taken hepatitis vaccination just week before the blood test and reinforcement shot just before the measurement in May. I also had been on pain medication because of my wisdom tooth surgery and they had to pump extra amounts of anesthesia into my jaw. I also ate painkillers for 2 months for that. This was in April.

So I also did my liver function test and all were normal except for the GGT, which was about 2x the reference. He said that GGT is used to monitor alcoholics and CEA can become elevated in smokers. Well I don't smoke or drink alcohol so he jokingly said that maybe I should start smoking and drinking. But in all seriousness he gave me a lot of confidence to stop doing Dr. Google and hyperfocusing on single blood test value as all other values are normal.

Of course still in the back of my mind the CEA is there. There's still questions about it. It probably really isn't that high (9.8) because I've measured it at a private lab, which gives me 3ug/l or 60% higher values than the national lab. The last measurement at national lab was done 2 months ago and it was 5.2 ug/l back then when week before in the private lab it was 8.7 ug/l. It's just that I read a lot of papers about how the CEA should drop/normalize within a month of surgery. Surgery was on 19th of July and the measurement was on 12th of August so.. Either my CEA rose until the surgery and this measurement is less than what it was then, or the CEA value rose because of invasive procedure and healing process or.. Well.. The cancer is somewhere else. While the fact that nodule is gone and it was independent from my testicular tumor, there is the worry that CEA is caused by the testicular tumor, which would be extremely bad news as it is very rare and extremely aggressive with no known treatment outside of surgery.