Meeting Mr Christmas.

This morning we met the consultant who will operate to remove the kidney. His name is Mr Christmas and, as he had a baby last week, he is now Father Christmas (All corny jokes courtesy of Helen’s dad).

Here goes for the medical detail, as briefly as I can.

There are kidney tumours which don’t go into the renal vein and those that do. The latter makes it slightly more tricky to get it out. (Also means that sometimes bits of the tumour break away and whiz up the vein to the lungs). Quent’s does go into the renal vein, but only just.

Mr Christmas has taken out 475 kidneys, 182 of which went into the renal vein. He did one last week which went all the way up the vein and into the heart so Quent’s is relatively small fry to him.

The process is as follows.

1. Get the kidney out. Remove the enlarged lymph nodes at the same time. These may or may not be cancerous, but will come out. Taking them out is no problem as they work on the kidney and that won’t be there any more anyway.

2. Check out the pathology of the kidney and lymph nodes (Mr Christmas). Recover from operation (Quent).

3. Move under care of Professor Gore (oncologist and specialist in immunotherapy). There are little speckles on Quent’s lungs so they will re-scan the lungs a few times over the next few months. If the speckles don’t grow, we do nothing. If they do, we will move onto …

4. …Immunotherapy and possibly even some extremely new stuff called “sunitinib”. In the words of Mr Christmas “we have lots up our sleeve”.

When I had Oakley, every conversation at the hospital seemed to start “at your age”, including one which told me I was “obstetrically geriatric”. Quent keeps being told the opposite – how young he is for all this. We will henceforth be nicknaming him “pre-pubescent Quent”.