His voice was so matter-of-fact on Sunday afternoon, as he packed his bags after the San Francisco 49ers weekend mini-camp and headed to his home in Southern California, one was moved to privately wonder if Tony Parrish comprehended all the facts of the matter.

Lose your right testicle on the operating table, as Parrish did April 19, and you are supposed to lose sleep fretting over the pathology report surrounding the ominous lump that team doctors discovered only three days before the surgery during an MRI exam.

But the four-year veteran strong safety, who only four weeks earlier signed a $12 million contract that yanked him from the unrestricted free agent ranks and made him a linchpin in a youthful San Francisco secondary, seemed nonplussed by the ordeal. Fact is, Parrish sounded a lot like a latter-day Alfred E. Newman ("What, we worry?") as he detailed just how he got through the week that could have prematurely ended his NFL career.

	“	There's no doubt I feel very fortunate. I've always believed you should try to live every day to the fullest. This just validated that belief. ”
		— Tony Parrish, 49ers safety

"Of course, it's shocking when they tell you," said Parrish, who found out two days after the surgery that the growth was non-cancerous and who plans to return to the field in less than two weeks. "You're looking at the ultrasound with the doctors, they point out a lump to you and you say to yourself, 'Whoa, man!' Think of all the emotions you're supposed to go through at that point and, at least for a time, they all applied to me. To tell you the truth, though, I never once thought to myself, 'This is it.' I didn't allow that."

Faith and family and his own fortitude brought Parrish successfully through the crisis. Oh, yeah, a little lucked helped as well.

Were it not for a groin injury Parrish sustained late last year with the Chicago Bears, and which was slow to totally heal through the offseason, the tumor almost certainly would have gone undetected and could have become a far more serious matter. When he told the 49ers trainers and physicians about the lingering groin injury, they suggested an MRI of his pelvis, a diligent move given the signing bonus of $3 million awarded Parrish.

As the replacement for former starting strong safety Lance Schulters, who defected to the Tennessee Titans as an unrestricted free agent, Parrish was a critical addition for the club. And his good fortune, at finding the tumor in its nascent stages, may have been crucial to his long-term well-being.

"Probably I was lucky the groin injury hadn't healed," Parrish acknowledged. "Maybe it was some bigger force at work there, you know?"

That said, his is not one of those tales in which a player seizes a public forum from which to proselytize, the ready-made excuse to safety-pin his spiritual beliefs to his sleeve and bound to the top of the nearest soapbox. There have been times, to be sure, when Parrish has offered a prayer of thanksgiving since receiving the good-news pathology report. But he has done so in a whisper, not a roar. The only amplification necessary has emanated from his heart and not a microphone.

For the smart but stoic Parrish, it is not altogether surprising that he soldiered through the days of uncertainty with only his parents by his side. Parrish is extremely bright but not a player who naturally seeks the spotlight with words or deeds.

Arguably the least-known of the Chicago secondary starters during the team's magical 2001 playoff season, Parrish was arguably the most consistent. Over the past four years, the former second-round draft choice from the University of Washington never missed a game, and was so taken for granted he likely wouldn't have been missed until halfway through a contest in which his name wasn't in the lineup.

Do your job too efficiently sometimes and you become even more nondescript on the field than a yard-marker.

So when the doctors told him he would need surgery, he phoned his folks, and not too many other people.

Most of his close friends on the Bears roster didn't know about the operation until they read about it. His agent, Joel Segal, found out about the growth almost as an afterthought. Recalled Segal: "We had dinner one night. The next morning he calls and says, kind of nonchalantly, 'Oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you. They found a lump and have to remove one of my testicles.' It was almost one of those 'by the way' kind of things for him. And there was no fear in his voice at all."

It is not, in hindsight, as if Parrish didn't understand the ramifications of what was about to transpire. When he was apprised of his condition, he spent some time querying several doctors about the most basic consequences of the surgery. He crunched the statistics and, as a well-educated player who doesn't need things spelled out for him, quickly became familiar with all the odds.

Everything happened so fast, though, for Parrish, that he never had time to dwell on the awful downside of the numbers. He had the MRI exam on Tuesday, met with surgeons on Thursday, and by Friday morning there was an anesthesiologist standing over him. A few days later, after only a modicum of anxiety, he found out the growth was non-cancerous.

"It all happened so fast that I never had to let the emotions get in the way," Parrish said. "Before I ever got to the 'what if' point, it was all over, and I was fine. Basically I'm a person who has taught himself to only worry about the things I can control. On this one, well, there was nothing I could do. It was going to be what it was going to be. Luckily, for me, it was benign. Beyond a little discomfort, it's not such a big deal."

There will be no chemotherapy or radiation treatments required to get Parrish back out on a football field. Some weightlifting, a little jogging and aerobics-based exercises, and his body should be ready for the rigors of a fifth NFL season.

Given what could have been, it is suddenly a season to which Parrish is looking forward, perhaps more so than any of the four years that preceded it.

"There's no doubt I feel very fortunate," Parrish said. "I've always believed you should try to live every day to the fullest. This just validated that belief."

Len Pasquarelli is a senior writer for ESPN.com