Louisiana Teen Diagnosed with Rare Cancer in His Testicle: 'Something Wasn't Right' (Exclusive)

Ronal Salvador found a lump on his testicle when he was 17 — it turned out to be a rare form of cancer

In July 2021, the summer before his junior year of high school, Ronal Salvador noticed a lump on his left testicle. He was spending the summer in Houston with his dad. “I didn’t think too much of it,” he says. “I just let it be.”

But the lump kept getting bigger. "It was more oval shaped than circular," Salvador, who was 17 at the time, recalls. "And you could feel something just wasn’t right."

When he returned home to New Orleans a month later, he told his mom something was wrong. She asked to see it. “I told her, ‘Yeah, fine. I don’t mind.’ She changed my diapers — what do I care?’” he tells PEOPLE.

His mother took him straight to the emergency room of a nearby hospital. There, he remembers doctors saying they thought he had cancer. “They did a few scans,” he says. “They wanted to operate that same night. They were saying, ‘We may have to get rid of a testicle now in order to get rid of this cancer.'"

At the time, Salvador says, he thought it seemed like a reasonable plan. “I wasn’t thinking straight. So I was like, ‘You know what? Just get rid of them.’ And my mom was like, ‘No, boy, you’re not thinking right.’”

Obviously he wasn't thinking about whether he might be compromising his ability to father a child. “Kids were the last of my worries,” he says. But his mother was thinking of the future. “She wants grandkids,” explains Salvador, who is the oldest of four kids.

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She also wanted a second opinion. The next day she took Salvador to Children’s Hospital New Orleans, where his cancer was confirmed.

At Children’s Hospital New Orleans, he was diagnosed with Childhood Rhabdomyosarcoma. Only about 350 new cases are diagnosed each year in the U.S., according to Children’s Hospital Colorado.

“I was the only one on either side of my family — my dad's, my mom's, even my step dad’s family — to ever get cancer,” says Salvador, now 20. “I was the first ever. Everyone was in shock.”

But at the hospital, his family got better news. "They said, 'Yes, this is cancer, but this is very treatable,'” Salvador remembers. Removing both testicles is not the recommended treatment, notes his pediatric urologist, Dr. Christopher Roth.

Salvador’s cancer was metastatic and had spread to the Lymph nodes near his aorta, Roth says. He required “intensive therapy and including multiple surgeries.”

“He was optimistic and brave throughout it all,” Roth said in a statement to PEOPLE.

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Salvador had four surgeries in late 2021, followed by six months of chemo and radiation daily for a month.

“I realized when I had cancer, you never know what could happen,” Salvador says. “I realized my life could end at any point.”

Salvador is now 20, finishing his second year as a pre-med student at the University of New Orleans. He hopes to one day become a cardiologist, he says. He usually doesn’t talk about being a cancer survivor – unless a friend mentions a loved one battling the disease. Then he'll share his story to give them hope.

“They find it hard to talk about it because they don't really know anybody with cancer,” he says. “I end up bringing up the fact that I had cancer and they get all shocked. They go, 'Oh, whoa, whoa. I didn't know you had cancer. I didn't know that. I would've never guessed.' So they like to talk to me about it. They tell me how it is. And I always tell them, "It'll be fine. You'll be fine. They'll be great."

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