NOW I’m starting to get nervous. But I guess that’s normal and therefore okay. It’s was such a beautiful day today, so I was going for a walk earlier. I needed to be alone for a while. There is too much in my head. It feels like I’m in desperate need to unload a huge pile of baggage I’ve been dragging around for a long time. At this point, I just got to let go. It’s not in my hands anymore. The good thing is, I have faith and I am very grateful that it’s going to be me having th...

Since last night I’ve been passing blood with my urine again. All I did was a little bit of super light clean up around the house during the day. But I felt the aggravation immediately inside my left abdominal area. Today it’s even worse. It’s not painful, just annoying and kind of scary. Now I also understand why my first doctor asked me several times if I wanted to have the stent removed. I can see how the discomfort could potentially turn into pain at some point. Coincidentally, I re...

Happy Thanksgiving, everybody! What can I say: the sun is shining again today. Not literally, but you know what I mean. I got a call from the hospital yesterday, briefing me on the logistics for my upcoming surgery on Monday next week. We got to get there by 5:30am. This makes me believe that they must get to operate on me quite early. That’s great! The only problem: I had hoped to get in touch with my surgeon before the surgery, because I wanted to double check with him that he’s going t...

Today is one of these days. Everything is grey. The sky, the bank-account, the remaining credit-card limit and the even the cancer. I’m not trying to be a ‘pity-me’ cry-baby, but I just woke up that way. There’s this little sting in my chest and right thigh. It’s probably nothing, but in the overbearing grand scheme of cancer, you can’t help but to think that this must be little metastases forming up. Of course, I know it’s irrational, but on a day like today, I would even refus...

This commenting functionality here is a real pain in the behinder. Your comments are VERY important to me, so I want them to be visible here. I don’t know what it is. It seemed to work for a little while, but now there seems to be an issue again. But either way, I can assure you that your comments never get lost – I always get a copy through email. So until this problem gets resolved some day, I will make sure that your comments will make it over in one way or another.

I think I was ab...

In a week from now, Dr. Badani will probably give commands like “LEFT”, “RIGHT”, “UP”, “DOWN”, speaking into a microphone that’s attached to his headset.

The headset is connected to a computer that will translate the speech into machine language. A millisecond later, the de-coding process will be completed and the result submitted to the operating Robot. That’s good, because the Robot that will take care of my kidney cancer, by actually cutting me open and taking out my ...

I think I’m slowly emerging from the down I was going through for the past few days. Sue being a constant reminder of the positive and Gods grace, me learning to accept the fact that there are things beyond my control, plus a few little cheer-ups of all sorts and kinds  - for instance, look at the picture atop of this post: that’s my niece Hannah, she can light up a room instantaneously  - yes, I think I’m slowly getting back on track.

One of the most profoundly import things in life...

I’m getting physically weak. No exercise in over six weeks is not good for me. I’m addicted to table tennis, and after cross country skiing and swimming it’s on the same level with badminton with regard to strenuousness. And I’ve been playing soccer and tennis on a decently high level back in Germany, but that’s nothing comparable to 2-3 times a week of hitting that little ball over the net. It’s the best physical exercise ever, hands down. It keeps me in shape and compensates for...

This is going to be a very personal posting. I did something very embarrassing and stupid which I’m truly ashamed of. A few months ago my wife bought concert tickets to a Miley Cyrus show for last Sunday. Well, I’m born in ’72 and a die-hard Blues and Rock-Fan, so my interest in Miley’s work is rather limited, however, my wife wanted to give our two girls something exciting they would look forward to. Our younger one, Britney, didn’t really care about the concert. But Jenny got more...

Dr. Badani just called. Very nice of him! Most doctors would’ve waited until the next day. Anyway, he carefully reviewed my CT-Slides and concluded that a partial nephrectomy can’t be done due to the location of the tumor. Therefore, the kidney will be removed entirely and laparoscopically (Laparoscopic Radical Nephrectomy).

So, I’m glad that I have clarity on this now. My wife Ann was a little sad over the news; she had high hopes that a part of the kidney could’ve been spared. B...

First, let me apologize to Sue, Kim and Ashley who had previously left comments on some of my posts. I am still relatively new to website building and all that, so I must have messed something up with the commenting feature. I spent several hours trying to fix it, with limited success. I ended up having the comments manually added back to the respective posts under my alias. Again, I’m sorry for that! I hope that from now on everything will work smoothly.
Secondly, I’d like to congratulate...

When Ann got diagnosed with her breast-cancer, we consciously decided to let our two daughters (I’m their step-dad) Jenny and Britney (15, 13) know what happened. As we went on to see doctors and go for treatments, etc. we certainly did not share all details with them all the time. Further to that, we tried to keep our fear and worries away from them.
And when I was diagnosed just a few weeks ago with kidney cancer, we told them right away, too.
We received a lot of criticism for deciding to ...

I am very sorry. Unbeknownst to me, it was not possible for readers to comment on my blog entries. This has been fixed now. So if you wish to leave a comment, just click on the according title of the blog entry and a comment box will pop up. Thank you, Sue, for spotting that and letting me know.

Dr. Badani’s office called me last night. They got a cancellation and therefore they asked me if I wanted the open spot. That’s great, because now my surgery is scheduled for November 30th. Tha...

We just came back from Columbia Presbyterian and our visit with Dr. Badani. I am greatly impressed by his thoroughness and patience. Unfortunately, I had never requested a copy of the report of my Ureteroscopy and the slides of my CT-Scan. And Dr. Badani made it very clear that he does need to see both in order to make a conclusive assessment of the situation.

But based on what he had today (PET-Slides and report, CT-Report) he assumes that we are talking about a "traditional" RCC, not trans...