It all started with a small lump Will Reeve felt in April. His reaction was the one most men know: it's nothing, it'll go away. It didn't. The 34-year-old journalist and ABC News correspondent, son of Christopher Reeve, the most famous Superman of the big screen, has now revealed that he spent the past months being treated for testicular cancer - and that he is clear.

He only went to the doctor because his wife, Amanda Dubin, kept insisting. An ultrasound showed a mass, and doctors decided to remove the testicle. Then came the worse news: the disease had spread to the lymph nodes in his abdomen. On June 10, Reeve spent six hours on the operating table having most of the affected nodes removed. Cancer was found in three of them.

Chemotherapy began on July 6 - two rounds, with sessions lasting around nine hours each, including scalp cooling to keep his hair from falling out. Bone pain, night sweats and blood clots followed. The second round ended on July 31, and on September 8 doctors went through his final tests and confirmed it: no cancer. "Today I'm relieved to share that we've reached the finish line, and this cancer is in the rearview mirror," Reeve wrote.

He didn't pick the hospital at random. He was treated at Memorial Sloan Kettering in New York, the same place where his mother, actress and singer Dana Reeve, fought lung cancer - and lost. Christopher Reeve, paralysed from the neck down after falling from a horse, died when Will was 12. Two years later, Dana died too.

Reeve says that over these months he lived, in a way, the lives of both his parents: like his mother, he fought cancer, and like his father, he depended on his wife's help. "I was there with my wife, who from day one has reminded me of my mother, now in the role of wife and caregiver," he said.

That is why he is going public with a story he had kept secret. "Watching up close how my parents turned adversity into something full of hope left a deep mark on my life and on the way I try to live it," Reeve says. The message is simple: listen to your body, and don't file a lump under "it'll go away."

From now on he'll go for regular check-ups to monitor whether the disease comes back. But the most important lesson isn't a medical one. How many men would see a doctor about something small that doesn't hurt - if there were nobody at home to insist?