How it started

It has been a long time but I am back! I would say that just about everyone in our lives knows what has been going on but I wanted to document it from my perspective. On March 4th Josh started complaining of a stomach ache. The next day, Monday, he could hardly get out of bed so I had to force him to go to an Urgent Care clinic. We went to the Urgent Care and after a lot of poking and prodding they decided it had to be his gallbladder and he needed an ultrasound. They wanted to wait until Wednesday to get him an ultrasound but he was in pain so I had to put my foot down and they told us we could go the next morning, Tuesday, to the American Fork Hospital to get the ultrasound. So Tuesday morning we go to the hospital and Josh gets his ultrasound. The tech was teaching some one about reading ultrasounds. She was looking at Josh's pancreas and gallbladder then asked him to lay on his side so she could get another look at his gallbladder. Then she said "let me look at your kidney while we are here." She spent a lot of time on the kidney and was pointing to the tech she was training. This is when I knew something was wrong. Josh was facing me so I didn't want to have a reaction because I knew it would make him nervous. When she was done she said it could take a day to get the results but we should call our doctor and then we can get them sooner.

We drove home and I called the doctor's office. The receptionist said to me "Actually the radiologist is on the phone with the doctor right now. Keep the phone with you and he will call you in a moment." The worry started to set in because it had to be bad for the radiologist to call that fast. The doctor called Josh and said they found a lesion on his kidney so we needed to go back to the hospital to get a CT scan and they were waiting for us at the radiology desk.

When we got to the hospital it took a little bit for them to take Josh back. I can remember now that he was googling "lesion on kidney" and I was getting mad at him. But the website he found said not to worry that it was probably nothing. They took him back and I called my sister Michelle to tell her what was going on. I didn't want to let myself get upset because it was probably nothing, a cyst at the most.

Some one came out to get me and brought me back to Josh who was in a special waiting room. This was bad. Why were they keeping us in the hospital and not letting us leave? A nurse came in and said that the doctor was about to call so we needed to answer the waiting room phone when it rang. The phone rang, Josh answered, he listened, and he started to cry. Some thing is very very wrong. He hung up the phone and started sobbing and said "it's cancer." I didn't want to be in this waiting room crying, I wanted to get him out of here. So we walked out to the car which felt like the longest walk ever. When we got in the car he just broke down in to uncontrollable sobs. I tried to hold him but it was like he needed to cry alone for a minute. I still had this feeling like, get out of here. So I started the car and drove us home.

When we got home it was like I needed to start working. We needed a urologist so I called our insurance company and they gave me a list of names. I just looked at the list and picked one. I really feel now it was divine intervention that I picked the doctor I did. I called Dr. Landau's office of the Utah Valley Urology Clinic. It was 10:30 am and they asked if we could be there at 11:00 am. I said yes and in the car we went. We got to the doctor office and filled out more paperwork and then met with Paul Rosser a nurse practitioner at the office. He immediately put us at ease with just his personality. He looked at the results of Josh's CT scan and said matter of fact "this is a very large tumor which means that it is probably cancer and you are going to need this kidney out." He wanted to have the doctor come look at it so he went and got Dr. Landau and the two of them sat down with us and told us "You have a 10 cm tumor on your 13 cm kidney. We can't save the kidney and we need to take it out." They scheduled the surgery for the following Monday.

So in the span of 2 days Josh had a stomach ache and it turned out to be cancer. Our whole world was literally flipped upside down. I have so much more to say about this experience but I will write a separate post for those : )