It was April 17, 2007. The day before, I had been at the gym here in our little town of Sequim, Washington, and I’d gone through my complete workout that I did on a regular basis. So there I was, lean, mean, and strong. The next morning, I got up to mow my lawn at 9 o’clock in the morning and about halfway into the walk across the yard my legs just disintegrated. I fell down. I’m lying on the ground. My leg is pointing east and I’m pointing west and I’m going “What in the world is going on here?” Obviously, I was in pain and there was nobody home out here. We live out in the country on 2-1/2 acres of land. I’m trying to crawl to my truck to get my cell phone, but I couldn’t do it. I can remember lying there thinking, “Well, I guess this is kind of the end of it."
I started screaming. As if by magic, my neighbor’s face popped over the fence about 150 yards away, and I yelled, “Call 911.” They treated me for a broken leg. A two-inch section of the big bone in the left leg had more or less disintegrated. Nobody talked about cancer at the time, but I was thinking it.
I went to see the surgeon every week after the surgery for checkups and he’d take an X-ray. For some reason, the bone wasn’t healing. After five weeks he said, “I better do a biopsy.” That’s when they found the cancer. I was told it came from my kidney. Two days later, I had a CT scan and that confirmed that I had a 10.6 cm tumor in my left kidney, which had metastasized to my leg