By Kim Clements-Johnson
The views expressed by the author in this blog are her own.
The scar runs like a thin, raspberry river from the source just below my breastbone, bending down and around my abdomen, hugging the left side of my belly button.
Its path is imprecise and meandering. The crusty shell of dead skin has long fallen away.
I imagined that if cancer came, decades in the future, it would bunker in one of my breasts. Instead, it grew larger and larger in my right kidney. I noticed a knotty bulge the size of an avocado seed in my abdomen in March 2023. It felt thick and solid, but it didn’t hurt.
Concerned, I made a doctor’s appointment. He assured me I was fine. A small voice from within said otherwise.
You know the scene when the parents and in-laws show up on Clark Griswold’s doorstep in National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, and his mom looks at him and asks, “Do you see this mole? This mole on my neck? Do you think it’s changing color?” That’s me. I Google every symptom when I have a cold, redness, bump, or ache. “Appendicitis, hernia, cyst, appendicular lump.” Nothing about cancer.
So I carried on. Commute. Work. Dinner. Kids. The daily rhythm of midlife. Months passed, and the lump remained.
I made another appointment. Again, he said he didn’t think there was anything to worry about, but this time he ordered an abdominal ultrasound.
A few days later, I joined my daughter on her college campus at a round wooden table covered by a crimson umbrella to work and catch up. It was early summer; the students had cleared out. We chatted and clattered away on our laptops.
After some time, I logged into my medical chart to see if the test results were in. Near the bottom of the report, skipping past the jargon, I read “Large renal mass, right kidney. Refer to a urologist for further testing.”
My daughter continued chatting, but I couldn’t hear her. It felt as if I were suspended underwater or if time folded in on itself; I was no longer in my body. Renal mass. Renal mass. Renal mass. I couldn’t rationalize it, so I became irrational. That evening, I went to the emergency room, wanting it out and mistakenly believing my emergency would prompt others to act with urgency. The attending physician ordered a CT scan. After hours of waiting behind a curtain in the too tiny examination room, he returned with news I already knew.
“You have a large mass on your right kidney. The radiologist believes it’s cancer. You’ll need to see a specialist.” A month later, I underwent a radical nephrectomy — the tumor was so large that my kidney, nearby adrenal glands, and lymph nodes all had to go.
I was 45, but I am not alone. Not even close. Oncologists have observed a disturbing trend that is now undeniable: Cancer rates are rising among Gen Xers and millennials. For some cancers in the small intestine, kidney, and pancreas, diagnosis rates are two or three times more likely if you were born in 1990 compared to those born in 1955.
The generations to come, my kids and yours, could be facing the same or worse.
The usual advice — don’t smoke, eat well, exercise, get screened — I followed. All of it. There’s no screening for kidney cancer yet. None for liver cancer, either. And still, cancer came. Doctors asked if I’d been exposed to radiation. I hadn’t.
Researchers have theories about why this trend is happening: plastics, forever chemicals, hormones, processed foods, sedentary lifestyles, toxins in our water and air. But the truth is, we still don’t have the complete picture.
What we do know is that women are overrepresented in this trend. And yet, public health policy hasn’t caught up. Women’s health research remains chronically underfunded.
The long-term consequences are not abstract. They are playing out in my life in real time. But how else are we supposed to find what routine screenings miss? We need new tools, funding, and urgency to meet this moment. What’s happening to my generation of women is not normal aging. It’s not lifestyle choices. It’s something else. And until we figure it out, we are walking blind into a future where more women — mothers, daughters, aunts, sisters, friends— face diagnoses in the middle of our lives with no warning, no explanation, and no way to prevent it.
The surgery I underwent was not enough. The cancer was aggressive. I spent a year undergoing immunotherapy. I fly to Dana-Farber every three weeks as part of a clinical trial, hopefully advancing the research just a little more. We need more funding for cancer research to continue trials like those.
That research is my lifeline and it’s the only way my daughters might one day be spared the same diagnosis. If we want a future where women’s bodies aren’t mysteries to medicine, we must invest in the science that can save us. Fund cancer research. Because my daughters deserve answers, and so do I.
Interesting
Interesting article