A new Lease on Life

Five years ago I lost a kidney to cancer. It was one of those stories with a providential ending. We were enjoying our family reunion on the Outer Banks. I had spent the afternoon with my sons at the shore, drinking beer and eating oysters. That night I woke with shortness of breath. That's a sign of heart failure. In the "business" we call it nocturnal dyspnea. It was eased by getting out of bed, but never completely went away. The following night it returned, and at that point I asked Tim, my son to drive me to the hospital.

The hospital was two hours away. After enough Lasix to turn me into a prune, the dyspnea was gone. The hospitalist of this small 19 bed institution told me that "the protocol" said that I should remain hospitalized over night.

I felt fine the next morning. The hospitalist was ready to discharge me, but "the protocol" suggested that, before leaving the hospital, I have a spiral CAT scan of the chest to rule out a pulmonary embolism.

The lungs were clear, he found, but there was a soft ball sized tumor of my left kidney.

Renal cell carcinoma grade III. This tumor is rife with vascular malformations that cause cardiac overload and heart failure.

Tony Bennet lost his heart in San Francisco. I lost my kidney at Loyola University Medical Center. I've had no more heart failure and no recurrance of the tumor these five years. However, the remaining kidney chuged and chuged along as well as it could, but that became less and less functional as the months went by, and I got sick.

That's why I have that big gap in the blog. Now I'm fine, thanks to robo-kidney at Loyola, and it's time I got back to business.

The new book,RAIN IN THE AFTERNOON has arrived from the printer, and it's a thing of beauty. Once you've read it, you can decide whether it's a thing of beauty on the inside. More about the story next time.