2026 had been weird. Before I got diagnosed I was dealing with a persistent cough for several months, my cat of 16 years passing away, and other familial health and personal problems I won't go into here.

So it was kind of a shock when my primary care provider told me I had cancer on top of all of that.

Thankfully my wife helped me get organized and a week and a half later I had the surgery to remove it.

To the right is an image of a mirror in my bathroom. At my peak I was 185.4 lbs, and probably not as much muscle as it should have been. I knew I wanted to lose weight so I started making some changes like trying to stand as much as possible at my work desk, eating less and trying to generally move more.

I kept track of the weight on the mirror with a red dry erase marker and every time I weighed in with a new low I'd add it to the list. When I started I had no idea what I was actually tracking.

Over the next few months, I got sick a few times from things my daughter brought home from her pre-school, my appetite had gone way down too which I thought was just how some stress had been manifesting. I took it all as a sign things were working as the weight started to disappear.

But by around 15 lbs it seemed a bit strange.

So in May of 2026 I went to urgent care to see if they could make sense of my disparate symptoms. Some blood tests, urinalysis and x-rays later the only thing they could find was that there was a microscopic amount of blood in my urine.

Skip forward to mid-July and I'm getting ready for my annual physical which is the next day. I look down while in the bathroom and my urine is a weird color. Later that day after I get home the urine is now bright red with some blood clots.

I take a picture (which I'll spare you from posting) and go to my appointment the next morning. My PCP takes a look and says I should get a CT scan of my kidneys. Maybe it's just a kidney stone or something. A few days later I'm getting scanned and after 2 weeks the results came back.

By the time I got weighed for my surgery I was down to 158.