It's Testicular Cancer Awareness Month. Let's talk about what we're still not talking about.

Hey,

April is Testicular Cancer Awareness Month. And this year, it's hitting me differently.

Twenty years ago, my dad was diagnosed with Stage 2B non-seminoma testicular cancer. I was 18. Working behind a pharmacy counter on Long Island. I knew just enough medical terminology to be terrified and not nearly enough to be helpful. We had doctors. We had appointments. We had information delivered in clinical language that answered the medical questions while leaving everything else unanswered.

What did this mean for our family? What were we supposed to feel? What were we supposed to ask? Nobody told us. We figured it out the hard way.

I've spent the better part of twenty years trying to make sure other families don't have to.

Nearly ten years ago, I became CEO of the Testicular Cancer Foundation, the only full-time staffed organization dedicated entirely to fighting the most common cancer in males ages 15 to 35. And every April, I sit with the same question: are we actually getting better at this?

Here's what I know. Testicular cancer is 99% beatable when caught at stage one. That's an extraordinary number. And we are proving, right now, that a small team with the right tools can reach people at scale. This year alone, over 52,000 people have visited our site from more than 20 countries. We've ranked for over 8,300 keywords. We've answered nearly 12,000 translation requests so that someone in Spain or Germany or Turkey can access the same information as someone in Texas. We've distributed over 1,500 shower cards to help young men learn the self-exam. And our book, If These Balls Could Talk, reached over 71 million people through nearly 500 media pickups.

That's not a marketing win. That's lives touched. Conversations started. Exams performed because someone finally had the information they needed.

We've done a lot of this with AI. We used it to build over 300 medically-reviewed pages of content, answering the real questions young men are actually searching for. Things like "Is one testicle lower than the other normal?" and "Hard lump on testicle, what does it mean?" Every piece reviewed by our team for accuracy, tone, and medical clarity. It wasn't about replacing people. It was about amplifying our ability to respond.

Technology is saving lives. I believe that deeply.

But here's the tension I can't stop thinking about.

We are living in the most connected, most technologically advanced moment in human history. AI can help us detect disease earlier, reach more people faster, and scale impact in ways that would have been unimaginable when my dad was diagnosed. And yet, men are still dying from a cancer that is almost entirely beatable. Not because the science isn't there. Because the conversation isn't there. Because stigma still wins. Because too many guys would rather ignore a lump than say the word "testicle" out loud to their doctor.

And even the men who catch it, who get treated, who survive... many of them are struggling silently with what comes after. The anxiety. The body image issues. The scanxiety before every follow-up. One of our community members put it perfectly: "Not the treatment, the not knowing." Cancer changes you. Not in a clean way. In a way that's hard to explain to people who haven't been through it.

Connection isn't the same as care. Information isn't the same as support. Awareness isn't the same as action.

We can build the most advanced tools in the world, and we should, but none of it matters if men still don't feel safe enough to speak up. If we're not pairing technology with humanity. If we're scaling content but not scaling compassion.

That's where TCF lives. In the gap between what's possible and what's actually happening.

Our Discord community now has over 600 members sending thousands of messages every month. Our Facebook support groups serve nearly 1,000 people. Every week, we host survivor and patient support calls where men show up, really show up, for each other. No scripts. No clinical distance. Just real people being honest about what this journey looks like. That work isn't scalable in the traditional sense. It's not efficient. It's not optimized. But it's the thing that actually changes lives.

This month, I'm asking you to do something that no algorithm can do: have a real conversation. With your son, your brother, your partner, your friend. Not a lecture. Not a forwarded link. Ask how they're doing and actually wait for the answer.

Teach a young man how to do a self-exam. It takes 30 seconds and it could save his life.

And if you're reading this and you're the one who's been carrying something quietly, I see you. You're not weak for struggling. You're not less of a man for being scared. And you are not alone. That's not a tagline. It never has been.

I didn't realize it at the time, but everything I've built from that point forward was for my dad, and for everyone who ever had to navigate that road without a map. I'm not done yet. We're not done yet.

This Awareness Month, we're going deeper. We're expanding our mental health resources for survivors. We're growing our education programs to reach young men before diagnosis, not after. And we're continuing to prove that a small, scrappy, mission-obsessed team can go toe-to-toe with the biggest problems in men's health.

But we can't do it without you. Your support, your voice, your willingness to show up, that's what turns awareness into something real.

Thank you for being part of this fight.

With gratitude,

Kenny Kane
CEO, Testicular Cancer Foundation