A UF psychology senior asks his roommate for his laptop and looks up a website.
Sitting in the middle of his living room amid dirty dishes and Xbox controllers, he lets out a loud cackle.
Roscoe Parsley, 21, looked up Check One Two, a campaign created by British brothers Simon and Andrew Salter to raise awareness about testicular cancer, one of the most preventable forms of the disease.
The Salter brothers encourage men — and sometimes women — to post funny or creative pictures on Instagram using the hashtag #FEELINGNUTS to bring the cause to light.
The campaign has even reached Emmy Award winner Aaron Paul, famous comedian Ricky Gervais and The Kooks, a British rock band.
Parsley says he checks himself regularly and has never found an abnormality.
He said he loves the campaign and finds it to be a creative way to catch social media savvies’ attention.
"I like it. I just think it’s a cool way to spread awareness," Parsley said. "Much better than in a textbook."
Check One Two also aims to educate men and women about the disease.
The website, checkonetwo.co.uk, offers a comical tutorial on how to quickly check for abnormalities in six steps.
Dr. Paul Crispen, a urologic oncologist at UF Health Shands Hospital, said self-examination is harmless and relatively simple.
Testicular cancer is a rare malignancy, affecting only about one to three per hundred thousand men in the U.S.
"It is, however, the most common malignancy of men between the ages of 20 and 40," he said. "Thankfully, it is a very curable cancer."
Nikolas Colley, a UF zoology junior, said although he had never heard of the campaign, he does check himself regularly.
Colley, 19, found an abnormality during his senior year of high school.
"There was just, like, a very perfectly round kind of lump thing, he said.
"So once I felt that it was only on one side and not the other, I thought, ‘Well, I need to go get this checked,’" he said.
Colley consulted a doctor who confirmed the lump was a harmless cyst after a testicular ultrasound.
"This nurse lady that I hadn’t ever seen in my life, she was pouring like warm jelly down there and poking and prodding with this thing that usually is used on pregnant women’s bellies," he said.
"I just found a kind of comedy in that."
[A version of this story ran on page 6 on 9/4/2014 under the headline "Need a good excuse to feel your nuts?"]
