Last night, I got a phone call from my mother. At 58, she has been diagnosed with kidney cancer. She’s scheduled for surgery within the next few weeks. According to her, the tumor is the size of a golf ball, and the surgeon seems to think he can get it all through surgery and she won’t need chemo or radiation afterwards.
I’ve been looking online for more information about kidney cancer, however, all the information I seem to come across is limited and full of pop-ups and miscellaneous bullshit, and I’m having difficulty weeding through actual, factual information, and advertisments.
Has anyone either known someone, or has experienced, cancer of the kidney? Apparently, the 5 year survival rate is around 60%, give or take, for a woman in the US, but I guess I’d just like to hear from someone who has been through it (and lived to tell about it). What was recovery like? Did you have surgery? Well…you know. Anything and everything. It would all be appreciated.
One of my uncles is a kidney cancer survivor. He has had seemingly no complicationns from his treatment. He is fortunate enough to be an identical twin, so if he needed a transplant, a perfect donor match was available. His twin is a colon cancer survivor. My mother has survived both uterine and breast cancer. One of her sisters is also a breast cancer survivor. One brother died of a brain tumor. My father died of lung cancer (he was a non-smoker). His mother died of pancreatic cancer. Yep - I come from the scum of the gene pool.
My father had a cancerous kidney removed some 20 years ago. As far as I know the remaining kidney has been able to handle the load by itself just fine. He didn’t need chemo or radiation either and had an uneventful recovery.
So sorry to hear that, phall0106.
I don’t have any other helpful insights, but here are links to two pages that are full of factual, reliable, and readable info on kidney cancer.