Some time ago a man I've gotten to know on the interwebz mentioned he'd had some blood in the urine followed later by the sharp pains of a kidney stone. I could relate, as I'd passed a couple myself several years ago and it was no joy, for certain! He eventually had his dealt with by getting it blasted apart with ultra sound or some other new tech and I think he's doing fine now.
Shortly after that I had to spend several days dealing with a few different issues with my Murray riding lawnmower ... wouldn't start easily (ended up needing the valves adjusted), drive belt came adrift and would NOT go back on right (learned how to route the belt) - and then the deck belt decided it was too old and tired to keep going. All this meant lots of crawling around/under/over and beyond on the concrete garage floor, up and down grunting and groaning for this 74 year old carcass. I think I removed and re-installed the damn mower deck four different times. A couple days later I was startled by bright red urine one morning and figured I had managed to pull something during the mower efforts. The color slowly went back to more normal that day and the next.
There was an annual visit to my primary care physician, Dr. Dixon, coming up soon, so I decided to tell him about it and spent another couple weeks finishing the last of the grass-mowing and first of the Fall leaf-mowing. Mower did just fine, thanks!
Dr. Dixon set up urine specimen checks and had a full panel of blood work ordered and a day later set me up with a referral to a local Urology Clinic. The urologist, Dr. Tongco, slated me for a CT scan and Chest X-rays and called a few days later asking that I come in to review the findings.
It turned out that the CT scan shows a 'kidney lump' and 'renal mass' on the right side ... about where I'd kinda been noticing a dull achy pain which (again) I attributed to my mower repair efforts, thinking maybe I'd pulled a muscle. Dr. Tongco decided he'd want an MRI done to better determine what there was to see in there. This led to an appointment to have a 'needle biopsy' done to get specimans from the kidney/tumor for analysis and a referral to an Oncologist.
Dr. Shao, the oncologist, scheduled a PET scan on January 3rd, '17 to determine if any of the 'small lesions' noted on the base of the lung in the original CT scan might need further biopsies done.
Meanwhile, Dr. Tongco has scheduled a pre-surgery visit on January 20th to educate us what will take place on the 27th in the Robotics Assisted Surgery theatre for my kidney/tumor removal (which is a 'nephrectomy' in medical jargon).
Dr. Tongco is a qualified surgeon using this Robotic 'da Vinci' system and it's pretty amazing to see the videos of this equipment peeling a grape, painting on a canvas the size of a playing card or folding an Origami bird.
My wife, Judy, and I have been taking this all in, step-by-step and learning much, much more than we ever knew about this whole deal. She's my strength.
So far, there's no indication that this renal cancer has metastasized to anywhere else ... no indications on nearby lymph nodes, the 'lesions' on the lung could be traced back to bouts of pneumonia in my past ... guess time will tell.
I'm posting this as a way for me to vent a little and requesting input from any that may have been there/done that on kidney removal such as this, especially those with experience with the da Vinci systems.
