Erin Sharp's Kidney Cancer Story

This is a guest post by Erin Sharp, 27, who was diagnosed with chromophobe renal cell carcinoma in 2025. Erin lives outside Denver, Colorado.

My experience with kidney cancer is one that is truly so unbelievable that it’s hard to put into words, but I felt like it would be worth it to try.

In October of 2025 right before Halloween I started having symptoms of what I thought was a kidney stone. I went to the urgent care, and they believed I had passed a small kidney stone and that I would be fine just to monitor my symptoms.

But the symptoms were getting worse and about 3 days later I ended up in the ER (still certain it was kidney stones). I received a CT scan and that’s when everything changed. The doctor came in and said there was a baseball sized tumor on my left kidney. They weren’t certain exactly what it was, but knew it was larger compared to a previous CT scan from 2020 when it was much smaller.

I was immediately confused because, while I was aware I had a CT scan in 2020, I was completely unaware of the presence of a tumor on my kidney. And as it turns out, this tumor had been found previously and even noted as an incidental finding but not a word of this had been mentioned to me at the time.

After this conversation, I had a few additional tests and was told that the likelihood of it being cancer was very high.

Looking back, this moment was truly the only time throughout my experience that I had any real emotional response. I immediately thought of my 3-year-old son and what this whole thing would look like for him and, of course like anyone that hears the word “cancer”, I also thought of the possibility of no longer being there for him.

I cried in that ER room with my mom and then we drove home and I cried one more time when I told my husband. After that I never shed another tear.

Most people who have had an interaction with cancer are aware of how fast everything moves once the discovery is made and my experience was no different. I found a urologic oncologist that was a friend of a friend and met with him the first week of November. About 2 weeks later I had a radical nephrectomy to remove the tumor and my left kidney.

So, there was this dichotomy of everything happening so quickly that I didn’t have time to process any emotions that may have surfaced but also life was carrying on. After that initial ER visit, I didn’t have any major physical symptoms and my husband still needed to work and I still needed to watch my son. As well, in the time that I waited for my surgery my maternal grandmother tragically passed away in a car accident.

Everything was different and crazy, but it was still much the same. During the thick of it, I felt it was best for me to push through and carry on with life as normal (or as normal as possible) primarily for my son. That is not to say that everyone in my life just let me be. I was surrounded by so much support from every member of my family. They managed to show support and love without making me feel like I had this giant spotlight on me and I will be forever grateful.

I think the biggest bright spot in my life at that point (and even now) was my family and my husband’s ability to make light of the situation and find humor when we could. Cancer is immediately big and scary, and it felt nice to kind of shrink its power over us with some jokes.

While I know every person processes cancer in their own way, I would never discourage some occasionally dark, poorly timed jokes if a person finds themselves in a situation like mine.

After the surgery, the biopsy results returned and the tumor was determined to be chromophobe renal cell carcinoma (chRCC) which I learned is a very rare and very slow growing form of kidney cancer. Because of this, the radical nephrectomy left me 100% cancer free.

I feel incredibly lucky to be in the position I am now, especially knowing that if it had been any other kind of cancer, it likely would have spread in the 5 years that I unknowingly spent living with the tumor.

Obviously, a big part of this story that I tend to gloss over is the clear negligence that happened when the tumor was first found. Originally, I felt a lot of anger over this specific part of my story but ultimately the tumor was there regardless and the outcome would have been virtually the same if I had been told about it in 2020, so I made a conscious choice to let it go. It is absolutely a fact that I will use in many games of two truths and a lie to come, but apart from that it is simply a small part of a very big messy story, and, thanks to my team of doctors, the ending of that story has yet to be written.

Almost 3 months post op and my life now is very “normal”. I have the usual barrage of follow up appointments scheduled and the physical scarring is still healing but my day-to-day life is back to what it was before. I am back to being a mom 100% and it is that fact that made me want to share my story. I had found the Kidney Cancer Association on Instagram and when reading through other’s stories I realized that there would be a benefit to sharing mine.

I was only 22 when the tumor was found and 27 when I had it removed; I learned that only 15-20% of kidney cancers are diagnosed in people under the age of 60. Most people my age don’t have any kind of cancer on their minds, but almost certainly not kidney cancer. I hope that by sharing my story, people my age will be more aware of this possibility.

And, to anyone going through something similar to my experience, whether as a family member or a patient, my biggest advice is to try to find and absorb those small moments of peace and light within the whirlwind and also you are never alone, there is always someone out there who is willing to make those ill-timed jokes with you (like me).