Big C in the course work

6 \o7a.m. June 26, 2007: I open my eyes to at least 15 faces within three feet of mine, staring at me expectantly. Everyone is calling my name. I find it frankly amusing. What's up, everyone? Hi! Why are you asking ME what's going on? I have no idea! And can I please go back to sleep? Yes, I know where I am, yes, I know my name, hi mom, why are you crying?

Joshua Lilienstein was supposed to be one of the people in the white coats, not the guy in the hospital gown. A near-death experience was not how he had intended to study medicine.

Back in April of 2006, Lilienstein was 26 and a month away from completing his first year at USC's Keck School of Medicine. Then he discovered a hard, irregular-shaped bump in his right testicle. What followed would both test him and teach him to be a doctor.

The resident on duty that day in the family medicine clinic diagnosed MSD -- Medical Students' Disease, a particularly virulent form of hypochondria. Undeterred, Lilienstein sought out a radiologist, whose own hypochondriac jokes sputtered to a stop when the ultrasound confirmed a tumor.

Within a week, Lilienstein underwent surgery at the USC/Norris Comprehensive Cancer Center to remove the cancerous testicle. Immediately after his final exams in early June, he had a second surgery at a San Francisco hospital to take out the lymph nodes behind the major organs in his abdomen.

For the next five months, he said, everything -- except for having cancer in the first place -- was "peachy." Testicular cancer is, after all, highly curable when caught early, as his was.

By November of his second year of medical school, he was feeling so optimistic that he almost convinced himself that it was perfectly normal to develop a beer belly in just a few weeks. Then, at a six-month post-surgery checkup at USC/Norris, a CT scan detected tumors -- lots of them -- in his abdomen.

"And blammo," he recounted in the first entry of the blog he began that month. "Suddenly everything, everything, everything, is up in the air."

Day 1. Monday Nov. 13, 2006: [The cancer's spread] places me in a not-too-euphemistically named "poor" prognosis category. The outcome for this group is maybe not much better than flipping a coin ...

EVEN in a class of 170 idealistic and committed medical students, Josh Lilienstein stood out.