Kidney Cancer: A Survivor's Story
When Falling Off the Roof Can Be Good for Your Health
Tom Lennon
Tom Lennon is accustomed to fixing things. For this 53-year-old former commercial deep-sea diver who spent years repairing oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, minor home repairs are a walk in the park. But his life took an unexpected turn when he was working on the roof on his home in Rockland County in the summer of 2008.
While cleaning leaves from the gutter, Lennon momentarily lost his footing and fell 20 feet to the ground. The fall left him with intense pain in his shoulder, and he headed to the emergency room of Good Samaritan Hospital in Suffern, New York. When he underwent a CAT scan to rule out the possibility of internal bleeding, a Good Samaritan radiologist noticed a “shadow” on his kidney that he decided needed further attention.
Later that month, Lennon visited to his urologist, Dr. Mark Fagelman, for futher evaluation. After several rounds of testing, Lennon’s urologist confirmed the worst: Lennon had what appeared to be a cancerous mass on his left kidney. Lennon was stunned. “I went from fear to panic,” he recalls. “I was sure it was all over. I was ready to start putting my affairs in order.” Lennon was ultimately diagnosed with renal cell carcinoma, the most common form of kidney cancer in adults.
Dr. Fagelman recommended several urologic oncologists in the New York area, one of whom was Dr. Michael Stifelman, Director of Robotic Surgery at NYU Langone Medical Center and a member of the NYU Cancer Institute. At their first meeting, Dr. Stifelman explained his minimally invasive approach to treating kidney cancer that makes use of the da Vinci robotic surgical system. In robotic surgery, the surgeon remotely controls robotic surgical arms rather than operating directly on the patient. The movement of the surgeon’s hands on joystick controls are precisely translated into movements of robotic surgical instruments—analogous to miniaturizing the surgeon’s hands and eyes and placing them inside the body.
Dr. Stifelman and Lennon decided to go ahead with a “nephron-sparing” robotic partial nephrectomy to remove the tumor. This operation, which Dr. Stifelman has pioneered at NYU Langone, involves removing the tumor and a surrounding rim of normal tissue from the kidney, while leaving the majority of kidney intact. In this way, the cancer is removed, but the patient still retains part of his or her functioning kidney. Research at NYU and elsewhere has shown that nephron-sparing surgery is equally good at controlling cancer as removing the entire kidney, while reducing the chance of kidney failure over the patient’s lifetime.
After the surgery, Lennon was surprised at the ease of his recovery. He had expected major scarring and not being able to walk. But for the most part, in the weeks after the surgery, “I felt like nothing happened,” he recalls. Further testing showed that cancer did not appear to have spread beyond the kidney, which helped quell some of Lennon’s greatest fears.
Today, 4 months after his surgery, Lennon is back to taking care of his family—and making home repairs once more. He feels that his outlook on life and his priorities have changed. “Things that used to concern me are not so important any more,” he says. “And the priceless value of my children became even more clear,” he says about his three sons and one daughter.
What advice would he give to someone newly diagnosed with kidney cancer? “Put yourself at ease, and learn as much as you can about the disease,” says Lennon. “With this type of cancer, there’s a chance that it could recur,” he says, “but now I’m prepared for it.”
