Patient Stories

By D’Ann George, PhD, Medical Writer Allen Rogers dressed as a knight for a family costume party. On a recent Sunday afternoon, Allen Rogers was riding a Bobcat tractor around his 500 acre farm in South Carolina, a gathering place for his extended family. When he’s not working on the grounds of the farm or the " barndominium" there, he…

Welcome to our series on "Clinical Perspectives." Read the introduction. Dr. Daniel George By D’Ann George, PhD, Medical Writer In the old paradigm, based on chemotherapy, when a tumor grew while being treated with a drug, that meant the drug was no longer working to control the cancer and that was it. Time to move on to another approach —…

As Steve Ruisi was rolled into surgery earlier this year for a radical nephrectomy, Frank Sinatra’s "My Way", coming through the speakers, seemed an ironic choice for an operating room. And now the end is here And so I face that final curtain... I did it, I did it my way. But when Ruisi’s surgeon came to check on him…

The following is an excerpt from a blog post by Laura Esfeller, a marketing professional living in California with kidney cancer. Laura writes at singlewhitekidney. Dr. Nicholas J. Vogelzang I received a letter today that I knew was coming, but I’m not going to lie – it still hurts reading it. My beloved oncologist – Dr. Nicholas Vogelzang* – has…

This is a guest post by Nathaniel Stout, who has a stage 4 collecting duct carcinoma diagnosis. He is based in New Hampshire. I was diagnosed with advanced, stage 4 collecting duct carcinoma (CDC), a rare and aggressive kidney cancer with a poor prognosis, in 2021 following two biopsies roughly two months after my cancer was first discovered. At that…

This is a guest post by Kenneth G. Winters, a retired US Navy Chaplain from Massachusetts. Read his other post, "Life is meant to be lived, not just survived", here. https://www.kidneycancer.org/stories/life-is-meant-to-be-lived/ One of my concerns about the first article I wrote for the Kidney Cancer Association was that it may have seemed overwhelmingly positive. Entitled “Life is meant to be…

Dr. Laura Bukavina Dr. Laura Bukavina traveled to Poland earlier this year to provide medical assistance to people escaping the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which began February 24, 2022. Bukavina is Ukrainian and migrated to the US at age 10. She is currently a urologic oncology fellow at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Bukavina spoke about her month-long…

Kidney cancer survivor, advocate, and KCA Ambassador Annamarya Scaccia spoke with the Cancer Interviews Podcast about dealing with uncertainty, persistence, and being a one-kidney body builder. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q8ntewiZq_8 Cancer Interviews host Bruce Morton is a prostate cancer survivor who hosts experts and survivors of all types of cancers. The podcast is designed to give cancer patients, caregivers, families and survivors the…

In all her research, Julie Lykins, 43, found that reading stories from other kidney cancer patients was one of the most comforting ways to understand this new experience she and her husband Chris, 44, had been thrust into. Chris and Julie Lykins But where were all the stories of people like Chris who were diagnosed with papillary renal cell carcinoma…

This is a guest post by Maggie Valdes, 26, a New Orleans native living in Houston, Texas. After living in Dallas for four years, I made the decision last May to move down to Houston to be closer to my boyfriend, Brandon Butera. What weird timing this was. A few months after I moved, Brandon started experiencing severe pain in…