One Kidney: The Prequel

So it has come to my attention that some of you don't know about Vic's first near-death experience. It was April, 1995. I was in school, he was at IBM. Early one morning, he woke up with chest pains. He'd been expecting something like this—his mother died of a heart attack when she was 51, and he was 49. So we drove to the hospital, with him complaining all the way about being robbed of his last two years of life.

They treated him as if he were having a heart attack and kept him in the hospital to run some tests. On the day that they were going to perform a heart catheterization, he felt a little gassy in his tummy. They decided to get Bob the radiologist to do a sonogram of his belly, just to see if anything was there. Bob was very thorough—he had to press and prod, but he finally found something. A mass.

"A mass" is not something you want to hear. Ever.

They canceled the heart catheterization and scheduled a CT scan instead. The CT scan confimed "the mass," and the doctor, Charles "Chip" Stark, said that they would need to do surgery to see what it was. He suspected cancer, and if that was the case, there were two options. The mass would be contained to the kidney, they would take it (and the kidney) out, and Vic would live. Or the mass would not be contained to the kidney, and Vic would die. There is no cure for renal cell carcinoma that has spread outside the kidney—at least, there wasn't in 1995.

Well, you all know how it turned out, because Vic is still with us today. But to this day, he never passes up an opportunity to get out of doing something with the excuse "I only have just the one kidney, you know!"