On Tuesday August 6th, I was happily sitting in a writing conference my second day back to start a new school year. After lunch I started feeling a stitch of pain in my left hip, so I did what I ask my students to do; I got a sip of water, tried to use the bathroom and stretched a bit. It did not help. As the pain grew, I decided to go home early and see if rest would do me some good. By the time drove from work in Los Gatos to home in Mountain View, I could not ignore the the sensation which was now from my hip around to my spine on the left side. I called my amazing husband to come and drive me to the doctor and we hurried to urgent care just a few blocks from our house.
At urgent care, they quickly checked me in and we prepared to wait. I struggled to get comfortable, a nurse returning from lunch recognized the pain I was in as severe and whisked me into a room with frosty Starbucks drink still in hand. There I received a shot of morphine and a pat on the back from another well meaning medical assistant, which sent me through the roof like Wile E. Coyote. They did some urinalysis, pregnancy test and a few other things while trying to keep me comfortable with morphine. Doctors kept talking about kidney stones and Urinary Tract Infections. We went up stairs for a CT scan, and later an X-ray. After about four hours, the doctor showed us a cloudy X-ray of my abdomen and pointing at my kidney uttered the unexpected phrase, "This looks like cancer." I had so much morphine in my system that that sentence and my inexperience with X-rays didn't lead to a strong reaction. We prepared to leave urgent care for the night, I used the restroom one more time and as I turned to flush noticed something that looked like tissue that was about an inch long. Not thinking to have the doctor look at it, I continued my previous action. I told him about what I had passed and he and I assumed this was the reason for my discomfort.
The next day the urgent care doctor had set up a meeting for us with a urologist. I was feeling fine and no longer in pain, having passed the clot, so I was perfectly happy to talk with someone about what had happened the day before. He was happy to hear I was not in pain and began showing us the CT scan. We scrolled through an amazing image of my body I could help but be fascinated with how clear my lungs were, what my diaphragm muscle looked like and how my bones looked as they flew past. Then he slowed the images down, and pointed to this growing dark spot on my left kidney. It got larger, and larger, we tilted our heads like the RCA dogs to comprehend why it looked so different than the other kidney. We did not get a second opinion, we did not ask too many questions, we saw something the size of a large strawberry that had pushed my kidney out of place and close to my spine. It was not normal, and it needed to come out.
On Thursday I went to school to participate in the last day of my writing conference and explain my absence to my bosses and coworkers. My lower school head encouraged me to not worry about the pending school year, but to focus on getting healthy as soon as possible. I will always be indebted to Stephanie and Mark for making this challenging situation a non-problem in my career.
Surgery to remove the tumor and my left kidney was scheduled for August 13, the following Tuesday, exactly one week from my trip to urgent care. This was the first time in my life I had surgery, anesthesia, or stayed in a hospital. My urologist visited me the next morning in the hospital and announced that the kidney and tumor came out with clear margins, no remnants of tumor left behind. All I had to remember it by was four one inch scars scattered on my abdomen and one four inch incision on the bikini line. I made it through my first surgery ever, the nurses were amazing and I went home 30 hours later to heal.
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