 Currently 25. I live in New York with my family, and about an hour and 15 minutes north of New York City, in Westchester County. I'm still a student. I actually graduate in about two weeks. I'm an applied psychology major, and it'll be for my undergraduate degree, but I'm looking forward to finishing very much. At the time, I was 23 years old. It was the fall of 2009, early October. I was working with a development and disabled girl, Respit Average, at her home, soliciting the appropriate social behaviors, so to speak, and I would take her out into the community and do things with her. She was very heavy, and she had a lot of atrophy on one side of her body, so I'd have to pick her up a lot. And in doing so, I got a bulge disc in my spine. I went to an orthopedist because I just felt shooting pains in my back and in my legs, and it was the same old thing that I always feel with most people when they go to the doctor. They go, okay, well, here's some anti-inflammatories, and here's some painkillers. Seen me in two weeks if it still hurts. So that's what I did, and I saw him back in two weeks. His name was Dr. Daniel Southern in Richfield, Connecticut. And he said, okay, well, you know, if the pain is still here, let's get an MRI. And I said, okay, good, that's good, that's great, because, you know, this pain is not going away, and it was awful. So then I went to get the MRI, and then it took about a couple of days to get that back. And I came to meet with him in his office with my mother at the time. And he said, yeah, you know, the MRI does confirm you have a bulge disc in your lower spine. And I said, okay, great. And then we talked about how we would fix that with an oral pregnant zone or an epidural into the lower spine into the disc. And that went well, and that was taken care of. And we had the whole discussion about how I was going to recuperate from that and what I needed to do for my back, and being a little more proactive about how I'm listing people and things along those lines. And from there on, I was about to actually get up and leave the office that day. And he had said, you know, would you just mind sitting back down? I wanted to share something with you that I had off the scene on your MRI. And I said, okay, sure. There was my mother there, and he said, okay, he said, when I looked at your MRI, he said, these are your kidneys. And I said, okay, you know, I don't know what an MRI, I can't read an MRI. I have no knowledge of that whatsoever. And he said, this is what normal kidneys look like. And I said, okay, you know, looking at it. And then he showed me what mine looks like. And in my right kidney, he said, you see this part? And he said, it's really dark shadow, rather big. And he's like, I would like you to go see a urologist to just follow up. He's like, I'm sure it's just a cyst or a kidney stone or something like that. It's nothing to worry about. When I left that office that day, and it sounds silly to say it, but I just think that intuition told me that it's not going to be a good outcome. And then maybe I'm sure you can relate to that. And from there, I went to go see a urologist in Danbury, Connecticut named Dr. Broder, who sent me to get a CT scan and an ultrasound. And that whole process with Dr. Broder took about a month and a half or so towards the end of October through most of November. And when he had concluded of doing the CT scans and the ultrasounds, he said, you know, he's like, it just, he's like, it can't really be cancer. You're 23 years old, you're a healthy female. You have no predisposition to it. No one in your family has ever had kidney cancer. He's like, I'm really leaning towards an abscess cyst. He said that his urologist and his department had gotten together and assessed my case and said that that's what it was. And he sounded very convincing in that day, specifically my mother and my father were there with me. And the way he had said it just wasn't enough for me. He kind of looked at me and just said, I'm 98.9% positive it's not cancer. And I, as snippy as it sounds, came back and said, but you can't tell me that it's not, right? And he said, well, no. And I said, OK, well, then I would really like a referral. So from there, I went to go see Dr. John Colberg at Yale Urology in New Haven, Connecticut. And I had met with him several times. And at first, I think that he kind of also dismissed my case saying, you know, it doesn't really look like it. It was grayish and black. There was really no definitive answer. And then one day I was sitting in his office again, which was the fourth or fifth time that I had seen him because I was so adamant about wanting an answer because it had taken so long so far with no responses to what was really going on. And he started listing symptoms and asking me if I could recall having any of them. And the one that struck me the most when he was reading through different various symptoms was that I remembered having terrible night sweats that summer, the summer of 2009, all the way through the fall and thinking I'm like, you know, I always would sweat through my sheets and my mom and my dad would always say, oh, it's hormones, you're hormonal, you're a female, you're 23 years old, and we would dismiss it. But when I told that to Dr. Colberg, everything changed that day. He wanted to do a biopsy that week. So I went and had a biopsy at Yale. And about five days later he said, just call the office, we'll have the results and we're absolutely going to know what's going on at this point. And I said, okay, great, you know, finally I'd get some answers. However, I would call every day, I still remember his secretary's name was Lucille, because I would call her every day after the five-day period of when those results should have been in. And every day she'd said, oh, Jessica, they're still testing them, they're still testing them, don't worry, you know, we'll get it, we'll call you. And I said, okay, but I would be persistent and call her every day. I think at one point she was terribly annoyed with me because I would call her multiple times a day because then it was about three weeks later in that grace period of the five days. And on one day I called her, this was like mid-December, December 18th or so of 2009, and she said, oh, Jessica, your slides were sent out for confirmation to Sloan Memorial in New York City. And I said, oh, okay, great. And as many of you as this is going to sound, I didn't even know about Sloan Memorial Hospital. So when I looked it up on the Internet, it said Sloan Memorial, you know, Cancer Hospital. I said, oh, well then that's really what it must be. Which, you know, I had always felt that that's where it was going to be, but no one, I think, wanted to say that to me. No one wanted to put themselves out there to say that a 23-year-old perfectly healthy female with no previous medical history at all has cancer. And on December 21st, 2009, Dr. Colbert called me. I was actually walking into a Math statistics final at my university. And he told me that it was confirmed that it had papillary renal cell carcinoma type 1. You know, people ask me all the time, like how the story of it happening, how they even found it, because the odds of it, and Dr. Colbert had told me the odds of them ever having found it wouldn't have been until it was way later hadn't I gotten hurt. And it was also interesting for multiple other reasons that my tumor was inside, embedded right into my urinary tract or urinary ducts in the kidney itself. It was inside and not on the outside of the kidney. So my understanding that is why they had suggested that it had an abscessed cyst and so forth or a benign tumor of some sort. I can never pronounce the name of the one they always talked about. Angela Pile and Noma, I don't really know how to say it, but I know that they kept saying that it was probably that. But it all changed when I had gone over that I had night sweats with him. I had surgery December 30, 2009. I was in the hospital for seven days. It was there for a week. We had decided it was my decision. Well, sort of my decision. I knew that I was going to have to have it removed, but it was either a decision between a full nephrectomy or a partial nephrectomy, removing the kidney. And to my knowledge as well at the time, there was no doctor who was willing to do this laparoscopically because of where my tumor was in my kidney. And it quite honestly was mortifying and probably one of the most terrifying experiences of my life to date. And I think that most people have been through quite a lot, whether it's medical or anything in your life. And this was the most terrifying experience. I also had an extremophobia of needles. So even thinking about someone cutting me open and removing a part of my body was just absolutely horrifying. So I went in for surgery December 30. And I was there for five days. I woke up out of surgery and it had felt like someone had taken a saw blade to the side of my body like they were cutting down a tree. It was just an awful excruciating pain. I never felt anything like that in my life, but I think that it makes me a stronger person now looking back. But I didn't get up the first day. I wouldn't get out of bed. And partially also because I found out that I was allergic to morphine. And I couldn't breathe when I woke up right away. I was on oxygen for a few days. And I had hives and I was very swollen. And then I was put on... I'm going to forget the name of the pain medication, but I was on that for the entirety of my stay there. And I didn't get out of bed till about day three. I had sat up on the second day, but it was just... I just can't even describe the pain. It's unbelievable. And then after my seven days, I also spent a year as even the hospital that year. I went home. My parents took me home and I didn't leave my house for about six weeks, according to what my doctor had wanted me to do. That I would not feel comfortable in a car. And I was in such cabin fever because all I wanted to do was leave the house. But you know, you can hardly sit up. You can hardly get out of bed. It took me about three weeks. I stayed in the guest room in my family's house because I couldn't walk up a flight upstairs because it was just too painful. But after about six weeks, I had gone back to let him look at my scar and how it was healing. And it looked fine. It looked great. Other than the fact that I'll have this six to eight inch scar on the body for the rest of my life, I think I'm fine. I'm perfectly healthy now. Sorry. It's such a difficult memory to talk about, but a very positive one too because it only makes anyone who's dealt with it or is dealing with it that much stronger. I think that it has made me an incredibly strong individual. I was never... I wasn't a weak person prior. I always found myself to be a strong person, an outgoing person, a leader in some ways. And after this happened, I think for the first year afterwards, I was distraught. I felt like, you know, why me? It was a very self-pitying attitude and I was never that person. And my mom would talk to me. She was the biggest... And my father, my mother and my father and my brother and sister and the most supporting people. Without them, I don't know where I would be, especially my mother and father. They would support me like no other and I think that it was through what they would tell me and, you know, that nothing, if I could beat this, that I could do anything. And, you know, you grow up and you hear people tell you that, that you could do anything in life and if you can do this, you'll be a stronger person for this. Having this experience, having gone through this experience, I am such a strong person now. I don't let things get to me like they used to and if they do, I have to remind myself where I've been and where I am. And I think that it really has impacted my life in a weird way for the better, to be a better person. If I could say this bluntly, I would say to keep your head up and to realize that today sucks, tomorrow might be worse, the following few months might be even worse than the day that you had today. But if you can get through this and if you can keep your head up and realize that there are people who love you and support you and that you're not alone and that there are so many other people out there who are dealing with what you're dealing with that you can push through it. You can realize that there's more to life than letting something like this trying to ruin it. And that's what I've gotten personally from my own experience. And that's the best advice I could give anyone is that it can suck. The experience is not wonderful, but if you can get through it, you're going to be a very strong person and you're going to love yourself even more.