Chapters Transcript Video Back Pain Leads to Man’s Surprise Kidney Cancer Diagnosis Well, we left Cuba when I was around five years old. We left my sister, my mother and I, I used to be a flight and I'm retired now. Uh for 38 years, I flew basically all over the world. What I enjoyed mostly about being in. It was the crew, the crew uh was very um together we um we got, always got together whether it was Paris or Tel Aviv, uh Istanbul or China in August. I started feeling this pain in my back, but I was like discarding it just because I thought it was because I had had surgery with my cervical spine. So, you know, basically my, my, my back is always hurting. So I discovered it. But then after it didn't go away, I decided to go to the emergency room and the DC T scan, which they, they saw the, the, the tumor on my left kidney. And then actually the lesion on T eight, my back, I met Mr Gonzalez when his urologist contacted me after incidentally finding a concerning lesion in his thoracic spine. Uh basically, it was good, bad luck. So the patient had had a recent diagnosis of a kidney tumor that was highly suspicious for something called renal cell carcinoma or kidney cancer. And there was a highly abnormal lesion in the T nine vertebra eroding through the back of the vertebra with clear spinal cord compression. So luckily the patient was able to walk and didn't have compromise and neurological function, but he was having radiating pain into his chest wall, which he had ascribed to his kidney lesion or some other disorder. And lo and behold, it was actually a highly symptomatic and aggressive cancer spread to his spine the way it was explained to me, if I remember correctly, they were trying to achieve 282 centimeters from the spinal cord in. So they could um do the highest available uh radiation. But basically, uh and he explained it to me so well that I, I was very, very happy with his explanation, but basically that that was the operation. It was very intense, very, um it's scary. But, you know, II, I think I'm strong because I kept testing my, my legs and, but II, I walked right away. II I didn't have Amy Amy, a type of uh you know, like weakness in my legs or anything like that. So one of the reasons it's so important to treat patients effectively is because, whereas 10 years ago, something like this was a death sentence now, perhaps it's more like a chronic disease. And the best thing about medicine is that it gets better. So most of us wanna survive long enough, we can take advantage of that. Right. And, and that's really true for cancer patients and for anyone dealing with these scary diagnoses, it's important that we give hope and we don't paint a grim portrait because the truth is his prognosis right now is excellent. Created by
