Robert: living through kidney cancer
I live in Yuba City, California, which is a small town about an hour north of Sacramento in the north part of the state, which I refer to as God’s country. I am now 53 years old, I have been married for almost 30 years, and I have two beautiful daughters, both of whom are in college in the east. So I am very poor, paying college tuition. My story begins, I think this is my third year in November. I had two previous instances in which cancer I thought affected me, but in the end didn’t. About ten years ago I was told I had tumor on my neck and when I had an operation, they discovered it wasn’t a malignancy but something else. Then about five years ago as a result of my routine physical examination, my doctor called me up and said I think you have lymphoma. And after spending two or three days before a biopsy and being told it wasn’t lymphoma but was another disease called sacroid I had two instances in which I had been told that I had cancer, and didn’t.
The symptoms
So three years ago when I went in for my routine physical examination, I had been very tired. I’m an avid golfer and I play a lot of golf, and I do exercise, and I had been noticeably a little more fatigued, and also, my back had been bothering me. And those of us who have back pain know that sometimes you have pain down your leg, and I had pains down my leg but in addition I’d had some numbness in my toe. And I just assumed that it was part of my back problem. So really it’s a result of numbness in my toe, I decided it was time to see my physician for another routine physical examination. I had missed the previous year, but I went and visited him. I have a great doctor that I know personally, so I went through my whole battery of different kinds of things, and everything appeared to be normal. I told him about my tiredness and about my toe and we laughed because he assumed also that it was my back that was perhaps giving me problems with the tow. Anyway, you know I spent my day at routine physical examinations and went home. And the very next day, in the afternoon, at five o’clock, which I knew when he called was obviously some problem. My physician called and said, Robert, I think you should come back in, we need to do some more blood work. And I said, “What’s the matter?” And he said, “Why don’t you come over right now?”
Well, when your physician tells you to come over at 5:15 on a Friday afternoon, you obviously think, you know, what’s wrong. So I go back and the first thing he does is sit me down and they take so many vials of blood out of my arm that I was beginning to wonder, and basically he said to me, he said, “Robert, your hormonal levels are a little bit off. He said you had absolutely no testostricin and he says, “Is everything okay at home?” And I said, “Well, yes, everything is okay as far as I understand it.” But he said, “you had absolutely none. …read the rest of this entry»