Patient Stories

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…

This is a guest post by Susan Hill, a member of the KCA’s Patient & Caregiver Advisory Council and wife and caregiver of Bruce Hill. She documents their adventures on Instagram. When we found out Bruce had an “ugly” tumor on his right kidney and needed a radical nephrectomy, my head was spinning. Leaving the hospital, I knew I needed…

“I’m done watching.” Patricia Rutter with her grandchildren. Sharon Rorie, on the phone with her sister and brother, waited for the litany of questions that would normally follow an announcement like that. Instead, both were in immediate agreement. The siblings spent the last two years watching the nodule on their mother’s kidney as she went through a series of kidney…

Early in the Covid-19 pandemic, Heather Colby, a fitness instructor, took her POUND exercise classes outside, starting with about 10 people in a local park where she lives in Long Island, New York. It was a welcome break for her class to get moving and do something social safely. From left, Elyn, Heather, and Meagan with their son Caleb. “Some…

Leah Christoforidis was 32 weeks pregnant when she started feeling the symptoms of kidney cancer.  She pushed back against the suggestion that it might just be muscle pain – Leah is something of a fitness buff, and this didn’t feel like any pulled muscle or strain she’d ever dealt with before. An ultrasound confirmed a mass on her kidney. She…