Michael Marto

Well initially I was, first I was 43 years old and I was going to get a regular physical, just to take a routine physical, which we all should do once a year and I have a pretty stressful job and travel quite a bit , so its something that I like to try and do every year. And I had gone in for my routine physical. Came out of my routine physical with no signs of alarm, no problem. I did a pretty advanced one with vamp blood work, all the advanced diagnosis that you can have, heart monitoring and everything else. Everything seem to be really, really in good shape. Something said to me that I wanna do one in even more in depth analysis. I had read an article in Men’s Health Magazine, one of the magazines I read every month that had talked about the new breed of high speed CT Scans of computer tomography. You know, the scans that can look inside of you basically and see if there’s any abnormality or any6thing you should be concerns with. So I called my physician she said “ Well, you can do this but its something you’ll have to do on your own, insurance doesn’t pay for it, you know. You don’t smoke, you don’t drink, you’re not really overweight, you don’t have a lot of the risk factors, but its never a bad thing to do” So, she said “You know, you can go do it” . So I decided to do it. She got the results a couple days later with this alarming look on her face and came to see me. And they had found in the CT Scan something which they couldn’t believe. A huge, huge tumor in my left kidney. And I mean Scott can tell you the size of it. I mean it was like a tennis ball, I think, a lemon. I mean it was huge.

Well after meeting with multiple doctors, there was no ambiguity or any vagueness about what they said had to happen. There was no varying options, they all said it has to come out. I’m like what has to come out? The tumor? No, the kidney has to come out because when you have a renal cell carcinoma that size there’s no way to effectively go in and surgically take it out with out the risk of it seeding and as you know the kidney processes the blood for the whole body. Well if it seeds and there’s any cancer cells in there it basically, its like distribution. So its like sending out a virus, sends it to the rest of your body, you’ll contract cancer everywhere else and you’ll die.

So he goes in with this procedure, I’m in surgery on a Monday, I found out on a Thursday. The guy gets me in for surgery Monday. I’m back home Tuesday and all I have is three tiny little cuts and a little small incision here down below my waistline where they had to take out the kidney. Very, very small I was back to work the following week or the following week and a half. That’s hoe minimally invasive and destructive the surgical procedure was. And on top of that his ability to see with these magnified cameras and high-def imagery inside to really be sure that everything in the perinatal cavity and looking around the kidney was done is a lot greater than a surgeon standing with a pair of glasses looking down a surgical when you’re cut open like this. So in my book the procedure was not only far more advanced and more scientific in its approach. More precision more of what you think of in the term surgical but a lot less invasive, the recovery time was unbelievably fast. And thank God the greatest bonus that we got was that when we went to pathology the conclusion from pathology was that there was no cancer cells at all in the lymph nodes and that it was clean and that the tumor was what’s called self, was called encapsulated. So, none of the bad cancer cells had gotten out.