Close to 12 years ago-the whole story

It was a Sunday morning in early May 2012.

I went to Home Depot for some stones for a walkway to the garage door. I remember going to the john and than yelling at my wife for putting some sort of cough syrup or candy in the toilet which made it red. Then I remembered she apparently did that a few weeks before when the toilet had tured red before.. Next time I watched and discovered that the red in the toilet was coming from me. If that does not scare the s--t out of you I do not know what does.

A call to my sympathetic GP gave me his answer. I simply broke a blood vessal during an athletic sexual encounter the night before. I did not want to disappoint him or myself, but that was not the case. 

To the GP the next day for some tests and the Urologist the day after. The Urologist  (one of the top dogs in a large practice) sent me for a CT scan a week or 2 later. A couple bottles of some kind of barium to drink for the test. As a Joke I asked the nurse if I could have an extra bottle. They thought I was crazy. Maybe I was. I asked the nirse at the CT scan if everything was ok and she said I have to ask the doctor and I thought nothng further of it.  I went to Baltimore for the Memorial day holiday. When I got back a  call from the Urologist office came in where they wanted to schedule an appointment and somewhere in the conversation the word Cancer was blurted out. I held it together pretty well but my wife went bonkers. I was not quite 59 and fairly healthy. In my wildest dreams I never thought I would ever get Cancer and who ever heard of Kidney Cancer.

Well the Urologist I originally saw ( top dog) brought in his new associate who had just completed a fellowship at Baylor where he had done some 125 Laproscopic Kidney surgeries. The top dog had not done any.

Then came the scheduling of my surgery which I think had to have been scheduled around various golf games and the availability of the top dog to be there. As it turned out the top dog never showed up for my August 1, 2012 surgery. During the wait in the first or second week of July my wife took me to a B and B on the Canadian side of Lake Huron to relax. She thought it would be nice to go to this highly recommended British Pub in town where they brought out all of the choices on a cart before ordering. I was not amused by the Kidney Pie.

By the time the surgery came around I was in a blur and after the surgery I learned what pain was. Then things got better. Day by day. Week by week until about 6 weels later when I felt good enough to fly to Seattle to see most of my family and go on a major trail and show off and laugh about my beauty marks.  I wanted to get my story out there before partheimers sets in and I can no longer remember it. And this is the set of experiences that I went thru to join this wonderful group and which nobody in their right mind would join on ther own.

Icemantoo