2003

In June 2003, we took my younger brother out to school in Idaho. David was just a baby, and we had just bought our first minivan, so we drove from Houston to St. Louis to pick up my mom and my brother and head west. We stayed for a wonderful week in a fantastic resort in Driggs, ID. We spent the week driving around Yellowstone and over to Rexburg to get Matthew set up for school. We visited the Tetons and saw geysers and moose and buffalo and even a few bear. Mom was pretty stressed about leaving Matthew as a new freshman, and I know it was hard for her to leave him. On the way home, she started getting sick. Somewhere in Iowa, I think, or Nebraska, she started throwing up and having really bad pain in her kidneys. She was sure it was a kidney stone. We stopped several times for her to use the bathroom and she was in such pain. Nathan pulled over at one point and gave her a priesthood blessing. He started to say that everything would be ok… and then said, “or not”. She always laughed about that later. I knew at that point that something was wrong and nothing was ever going to be the same. Nathan drove like crazy to try to get us home, so she could see a doctor, but her pain was too intense. So about 50 miles from her house in Missouri, we stopped and took her to an emergency room. I hadn’t seen her in that kind of pain before. They immediately said they were going to admit her and do an MRI and CAT scan. We took the kids to her house and I went back to the hospital to be with her and see if she was getting checked out the next day. The doctor came in and told her that she had a “large mass” on her kidney. It was over 10cm. She had just cancelled her health insurance a few months before. We knew this was going to be a problem. Thankfully, she knew an urologist from church and we called him up right away. He referred her to a colleague of his and he immediately scheduled a nephrectomy. She was on pain meds until they could do the surgery a few weeks later.

I came home to TX with Nathan and then went back with David when it was time for her surgery. The days before the surgery were full of us driving to have scans taken of the area to be removed. Her anesthesiologist was a big white haired man in a Harley Davidson bandana. She expressed her nervousness about the surgery and he told her not to worry, that he was gonna put her out good. I remember being with her in the waiting room and the intern came in … Dr Zhu… and looked at her scans then said, “Oh no, this gonna be too hard.” Mom just smiled! It was to be a hand assisted laparoscopic nephrectomy. Which means that it was big enough that they had to open her up a little more and bring the thing out manually. They did this and were confident that they were able to remove it all.