I was at work one Friday when at lunchtime I went to the bathroom and passed blood. I thought, “This can't be good.” I went back to my computer to look up what it could be and decided to drive myself to the emergency room. I told the doctors I had passed blood and by then I had a terrible pain on my right side. They gave me a CT scan and said I had a "renal mass." This was all within about three hours of passing blood. My regular doctor came by on Saturday and said he saw the scan and he thought it was kidney cancer. By then, a urologist had been contacted and he scheduled a radical nephrectomy for the following Thursday. It turned out to be kidney cancer - stage 3 - because of the size of the tumor he said. I was in the hospital a total of 11 days. That was about 15 months ago. Thank God for that urologist. I've told him he saved my life. I go for periodic X-rays, and a CT scan is scheduled for next week. I keep praying that none of that cancer ever comes back.

My kidney cancer was found purely by accident as a lot of times they are. I had an abscess tooth and went into the dentist. Seconds after getting into the dental chair, she found a lump on the inside of my cheek. She sent me directly to an oral surgeon who did a biopsy. It came back cancer of the salivary gland. I was sent to see a top ENT (ear, nose, throat) doctor who did an upper CT scan and performed surgery on my mouth. After that surgery was performed, the CT scan came back with something on my kidney. Well, what it saw was the top of a 10 cm tumor on my kidney. I went in a year ago on Valentine's Day and had my left kidney removed. It was removed laparoscopically by a top transplant surgeon. I was very lucky. Both cancers turned out to be very rare forms, acinic cell carcinoma (which only 3% of the population gets), and chromophobe renal cancer, which only 3% of the population gets. Both have few statistics on them, but my prognosis is very good. Thank goodness I had a good dentist who checked my cheeks!

I didn't have any symptoms before I was diagnosed with RCC. I went for my routine physical that included blood work and urinalysis. They ran 6 urinalysis tests over the summer that showed traces of blood. Then I went for an ultrasound of the abdomen, a cystoscopy, and a CT scan. The final test confirmed their suspicions. In January I will undergo surgery for removal of the kidney. Funny thing is, I feel great!

I am 53 and just had a cancerous tumor removed from my kidney approximately 1.8 cm at stage 1-2. I had absolutely no symptoms and was very fortunate they found it while I was having a CT scan on my gall bladder. There was no other follow up treatment and I am to go back for scans of some of my abdominal organs every 6 months. They tell me my prognosis is very good!!! It's time to start celebrating life and telling people at work when they want to start complaining ....take a number...."doctors orders" :)

My mother was diagnosed with renal cancer at age 63. At the time of diagnosis it was determined that she had the disease for around a year. In stage IV it was found that it had spread to the pelvic region, was 6 cm in size, inside the kidney. How she discovered was that it was protruding out of the kidney causing pain the low back area. She kept going to a chiropractor until he made things worse. All along she felt so tired and so blah. Her iron was low and she was cold all of the time. Doctors attributed that to her bad heart and the iron as just anemia. All along the tumor was taking blood and that is why surgery was not an option. She had it too many other spots I suppose and they said she would have needed more than 8 pints of blood in surgery. If you feel any of those symptoms of being tired and not yourself, get your doctor to look into things more deeply. If she had, she might have caught it in stage 1 or 2 with a higher chance of survival.

I first had renal cell cancer in 1995 and had my right kidney removed. It took 12 years to come back to my lungs found in a routine chest X-ray. Then the cancer had moved to my brain and I had them treated with Gamma Knife. In June 2009 the doctors also removed a small cancerous tumor on my scalp. I have a tried a clinical trail TK1258 but that caused my triglycerides to increase so currently on no medication....hoping for the best.