Four days ago, the rage comic above was posted to Reddit by CappnPoopdeck. It described the true story of her friend, a man who decided to try his ex-girlfriend’s pregnancy test himself. To his surprise and confusion, the results came back positive. Funny? Sure, sort of. But also, Reddit commenters quickly noted, a symptom of a potentially deadly disease.
As it turns out—and as many Redditors hastened to warn CappnPoopdeck—a male positive pregnancy test could be a sign of testicular cancer. Med student and Reddit user Wecancallmeb explains:
OP should absolutely see his physician to be safe. Pregnancy tests are based on levels of human chorionic gonadotropin which is produced by the placenta, but in a male it can be elevated by testicular cancer.
When CappnPoopdeck noticed all of the comments about cancer on her comic, she immediately told her friend, who went and got himself checked out right away. Low and behold, as the follow-up comic notes, he had a small tumor. While it’s probably a bad idea to crowdsource important medical diagnoses, it sure is a good thing that the people of Reddit were able to sound the alarm when they noticed something fishy was up. [Reddit via CBC via Twitter]
