October 2010: James Harris

Featuring and Written By:
James Harris

Hello, my name is James Harris.  My story is nothing compared to most of these warriors on this site; but, I thought I would share my story as I have gotten so much inspiration from others here.

I am a 39 year old father of 4 beautiful kids: my oldest boy is 11, another boy 9, a little princess 4 and my little man just turned 3. I also have the most beautiful and loving wife.

This all started on Easter Sunday 2009.  I wasn't feeling good at all. I thought I was dying.  I was just super cold and running a fever of 104.5. My wife called the hospital and they told her to get me to the emergency room. After many blood tests with results that were all way off, they did a chest x-ray and found my right lung looked to have a fungal ball. They did a chest x-ray and the doctor came in and told my wife to sit down. He said here is the story. You have only 1 kidney and it has a huge vascular mass on it that looks like it could burst at anytime. We live in a small town in Wyoming so they transported me via an ambulance to Denver which is 4 hours away.

I had a partial nephrectomy.  They took half of my kidney along with a 13 cm tumor which was diagnosed as clear cell rcc stage 3a, grade 3. I was in ICU for 6 days and in the hospital another 3 days. I had dialysis for about 30 days and then my half of a kidney started working.  All was good.

In about February 2010, I started feeling really tired and just not good at all.  I was going to the local hospital it seemed like every week.  They would run tests and say every thing was normal. Finally, my wife called my oncologist in Denver who is the greatest. She set us up with an internal medicine doctor who found that my FE sat was very low.  I did 2 weeks of Iron infusions and felt better for about 3 weeks. Then, I went in for my 1 year scans and they found another mass 3.6cm on the remainder of my kidney.  They did a biopsy and found it was recurrent rcc.

I had another partial nephrectomy June 16, 2010, and now I have only an eighth of my kidney.  I had a lot of internal bleeding and received 18 units of blood during my month stay in the hospital.  And I had an emergency surgery to break up blood clots and to control the bleeding. The nephrologists were getting ready to put a fistula in my arm and my wife was going to go through the 3 week training for at home dialysis; but, after a month, my little piece of kidney started working. God is great! I did alot of talking with him.  I told Him I did not like dialysis and he must have agreed with me.

Right now, all is good.  I'm watching my little ones grow up and enjoying all of God's creation.

Thanks for this wonderful site!

James Harris