A Personal Update

I sort of fell off the grid there for a few months, huh? Well, I promise I had a really, really good reason. I had cancer.

I know, right? Record scratch for some of you. A 40-year old female with no family history of cancer, who doesn’t smoke or really drink, is a healthy weight and exercises constant vigilance around plastics, artificial additives and the like – hit with old man cancer. Honestly, even my surgeon was shocked when the pathology report came back.

Because I didn’t have the definitive diagnosis until after my surgery, I kept my situation pretty quiet. I’m sure some of you are just finding out via this post or were caught completely off guard by my post-surgery Facebook victory lap. While this blog is based around my profession, I felt it would be cathartic for myself and maybe helpful for others if I shared what my cancer journey looked like.

We’ll resume our regularly scheduled real estate programming with my next post. Please feel free to skip this post if the content is problematic for you.

Mystery Pain

For well over a decade, I’ve suffered from recurring mystery abdominal pain. It comes in unpredictable episodes and the pain, originally striking for a few hours of discomfort at night, now lasts for days at a time. I had been through the ER, my PCP, the gastroenterologist, and neurology with no definitive diagnosis.

Back in August, I had a 10+ day episode that was so painful and debilitating, I lost it in my PCP’s office and told her I wasn’t going to stop pushing until we figured out what was going on. To be fair, I hadn’t slept for more than 3-4 hours at a time for over a week, and I wasn’t going back to gastro so they could tell me it was in my head. I apparently was sufficiently distressed that my PCP ordered a CT scan before referring me back to gastroenterology. So in late September, I went for the scan.

As the CT tech was loading me into the machine, he off-handedly remarked “This has been going on for over a decade and no one ordered a CT scan?!”. Kind Reader, I kid you not, in that moment my subconscious replied “not yet“. Sliding into the machine, I thought to myself, “well, that was super weird, but whatever.”

Unexpected Results

I went about my life until the next day, when my phone alerted the results were back. I (stupidly, very very stupidly) opened my results in the middle of a group of people, wrapping up a meeting at my brokerage. As I skimmed the report, my eyes snagged on the section reporting on my left kidney having a mass “suspicious for renal neoplasm”. What the what? I hit google, resulting with “a tumor or growth that develops in or on the kidney”.

At this point, I do what any woman does. I screenshot the report and texted it to my friend who is a doctor, with the question “Is this cancer?”. When my phone immediately started to ring, my heart sank. We’re Geriatric Millennials – we text or hang out in person. We do not casually call each other because we all still have trauma from calling our friends’ landlines and getting stuck talking to their mom first.

And so, I stood in the hallway outside my brokerage’s office, making my friend break the news to me that yes, there is a mass on my left kidney, and while the mass can be benign in theory, in her experience it has always been cancer.

Life Interrupted

Life both sped up and slowed down in the time that followed. Some days it was all I thought about and some days it was barely a passing thought.

Luckily my PCP referred me directly to THE GUY, the one you want to see if you have a potential mass of cancer on your kidney. The one where, when you call to schedule an appointment, you have to call a different person whose job is to manage only this doctor’s schedule. I snagged a cancellation spot about two weeks out and distracted myself while I waited.

The Mathematician was clearly rattled. I was fortunate enough to connect with another friend, the only other person my age I knew who had experienced cancer, and her insight was heaven sent. She told me my life would never be the same, it would always be “before cancer” and “after cancer”, that I would have to see to my own oxygen mask first so I didn’t get overwhelmed by the emotions of the people around me, and, most importantly, I had to prepare for and accept that some people would not be able to cope and people I wouldn’t expect would show up for me in a big way. I don’t think that my friend, A, will every truly be able to understand how much her insight set me up for success.

I used the time leading up to this appointment to start telling the people closest to me. Some people received calls, who were then deputized to tell others. A few groups of people got a bomb dropped in a text thread because I just didn’t have it in me to make one more call. One lucky lady got a sobbing Jessica on her doorstep, simultaneously trying to figure out what was happening and chase her kids out of earshot. (B, you’re good in a crisis, I’ll give you that.)

The responses were often so incredibly indicative of the person. The responses all started with stunned disbelief and quickly sped into the person’s comfort zone. The doctors said “okay, what do we know?” The teachers said “okay, how can I help?” the business people said “here’s a door dash card so you don’t have to think about dinner” and the soulmates of my heart said “what the actual [bleep], friend?”

As one friend put it, “Some people run towards the fire, and some run away.” My tribe ran toward those flames like a pack of fearless Khaleesi, showering me with love and support. It truly blew my mind, and while I would have preferred to never have had cancer in the first place, I’m grateful that this journey taught me so much about what it means to be a great friend.

I started reading all the books on survival and coping. I made Spotify a playlist full of hope and created balance by making one full for angry rage songs. I drank fresh-pressed carrot/celery/beet/turmeric juice. I made plans for the future. I took my vitamin D. I saw a Reiki healer and started trying to make peace with unresolved pieces of my past. The Mathematician was unappreciative of my dark humor, but was in no position to challenge me on it. “Oh, babe, I can’t do the dishes today. I have cancer.” (I’m a Capricorn and my ancestors were British. It was always going to be dark humor.)

Waiting is the Hardest Part

When I finally met with the urologist/oncologist/surgeon/bad ass medicine man, I had another record scratch moment. When he pulled up my CT scan, he showed me the mass. It didn’t present like cancer in any respect – it wasn’t invading the kidney in the standard tear drop shape so much as it was . . . spooning the kidney? It also had some weird shadows inside that were out of the ordinary.

The urologist questioned whether it was cancer and proposed it might be an angiomyolipoma, which is a fatty non-cancerous tumor most common in women my age but still incredibly rare. If the mass was an angiomyolipoma, I could either cut it out or choose to monitor it to ensure it didn’t grow too big. Unfortunately, the CT scan didn’t pick up on whether there was fat content within the mass, so the surgeon ordered an MRI of the kidney and specifically asked them to look at it for fat content.

The first available MRI slot was 16 days later, on October 26. More waiting, suspended in mid-air, but at least now there’s hope maybe its not cancer.

Nope, Cancer

MRI results – no discernible fat content, RCC still primary concern. We’re back to cancer, specifically renal cell carcinoma, the most common form of kidney cancer. Next stop: Surgery Town with a stay in Partial Nephrectomy. The PA tells me they won’t be able to get me scheduled until mid-January. Yes, I am going to roll through the entire holiday season with cancer as my constant companion.

Shortly after making the decision to have the surgery, the surgeon’s scheduler calls me. The scheduler asks me why I haven’t returned her calls and informs me she’s been holding a spot for me. I express my utter bafflement since I was only put into the scheduling queue two hours ago. She then realizes she has her Jessicas mixed up (Not hard to do, there were a lot of us born in the 80s). She asks if I would like the spot she’d been holding for the ghost Jessica on November 20 since she’s not returning calls or messages. Uh, hell yes, I do since I’m already through my deductible for the year and I’m amped to get surgery over with before Thanksgiving.

From this point on, I have tunnel vision focused on November 20 . . . until I get bumped for an urgent inbound patient who needs my slot and multiple specialties in the room. WHHHHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY????!!!!

I’m rescheduled for December 16, Merry Christmas, Ya Filthy Animal. At least, this $60,000 robotic surgery is going to to hit me after my deductible is paid (thank you, shoulder physical therapy).

Surgery Town

Honestly, the whole surgery day went pretty smoothly. The robot’s name was Ms. Geri. The tech asked if they could play Christmas music. The anesthesia resident shot me so hard with an injection, it felt like I had a GSW through my hand. The surgeon tried to ask my permission on the entry approach, and I told him I don’t micromanage my surgeons so just do what would get the best result.

Also, if you are the person who was texting my surgeon about my case the day of surgery, I need to know. He asked me who I was that he was getting texts about taking good care of me, and my mother and I were perplexed at who we knew that would be texting him. The mystery of this episode drives me bananas.

Results were the best you could hope for. He said the mass was sort of gently floating next to the kidney, totally encapsulated, hanging on by a thread. He scraped for a small margin and ripped the mass out. I also set the new unit record at only 10 minutes clamp to release. I kept 99% of the kidney and they expect it to function fully going forward. If I’m going to do something, I am going to be a Rockstar.

Recovery and Results

Recovery was rough the first week or so, and Christmas is awfully blurry, but four weeks out of surgery I’m feeling back to normal. The anesthesia brain fog (which is a thing and it is real) has lifted and the incisions look not terrible (I plan to let people know I was in a knife fight and the robot won.). I still brace for pain when I sneeze because conditioning has set in.

A few days after surgery, the surgeon called and told me the mass was indeed cancer, specifically clear cell renal carcinoma. A quiet, mostly symptomless cancer that creeps in, slowly growing until it consumes the kidney and spreads to your lungs and lymph nodes – unless you find it early when you go looking for something else.

I don’t need any chemo or radiation. I got for a scan at 6 months, 18 months and 30 months. If they are all clear, I’ll graduate from cancer watch. Although sending me for repeated scans in a machine that increases your cancer risk . . . seems odd. The surgeon put my chance at 90% for full recovery, no recurrence.

I’l leave you with this bit of perspective. When you are the person with cancer, you are not only struggling to deal with your own emotions, but you are being buffeted by the emotions of the people around you as well. If you are in a position to support someone with cancer, it may feel like they are pulling away, but what you need to ascertain is whether they are pulling away from you or they are burrowing down into themselves so they can find their inner reserves.

That was a deep journey today, readers. We’ll get back to our normal ridiculousness shortly!