September 2nd

Hello everyone!  Kent is healing very well.  He has been up and is starting to get his appetite back.  He even got had a chance to go to watch Kennedy perform with her cheer team on Tuesday night.  We are so proud of him. 
Kent's first appointment this afternoon was with Dr. Childs.  He looked at Kent's incision and it looks to be healing well. Kent still gets tired quickly, but that is to be expected. He will still be taking Coumadin (explained in a bit:  they will figure out the right amount as his diet and activities returns to normal) and an iron supplement.  Dr. Child's told us that they took out 633 grams (about a pound and a half) of tissue and mass.  He said that the whole kidney was the size of a small football (about 15 centimeters long).
His oncologist Dr. Kent DiFiore put him on a blood thinner "Coumadin" to thin out his blood and make sure that he does not get any more blood clots.  That has been a recent worry with the doctors that the blood clots would block vessels or move through to the lungs or heart.  His first doses of Coumadin pushed his INR (International Normalized Ratio) blood levels up to a really high level.  Normal is between 2.0 and 3.0 and his first reading on Monday was 7.1 (They warned him not to shave or go anywhere near knives).  They stopped the Coumadin for a day and Tuesday's level was down to 4.1.  This evening, Wednesday, his INR level was 2.8 and he started back up at a lower level of Coumadin.
The next appointment was later this afternoon with Dr. DiFiore.  His office is in Salt Lake City at the UCS Cancer Center.  We went over the CT scan results that Kent had taken while he was still in the hospital.  They found that he had two peripheral nodules in the lower lobe of his right lung.  According to the radiologist, these two nodules could either be metastases (new tumors) or infarcts (tissue that is dying or dead).  DiFiore was skeptical about doing a biopsy because of Kent's thin blood, so Kent asked if we could do a PET scan.  This test is like a CT scan but PET imagining is a diagnostic procedure used in Nuclear Medicine to visualize metabolically active tissue using sugar or glucose molecules.  These molecules, labeled with radioactive Flourine-18 are referred to as FDG.  After the FDG is injected into the blood stream, it is distributed throughout the body (head to toe) and picked up and incorporated into cells.  These cells, containing small amounts of radioactivity, will be detected by the scanner. So they will essentially glow.  If the nodules are metastasized tumors, they will glow.  If they are infarcts, they will not be detected at all.
We will see the results of the PET scan early next week.
If they cannot detect any tumors, then Kent will be on Coumadin for at least 6 months and have to have frequent scans to make sure that no other tumors show up.  If the nodules end up being tumors, then his cancer will be upgraded to a level 4, and he will begin treatment for those tumors.  The treatment for stage 4 renal carcinoma is a daily pill called Sutent.  This treatment is only available for stage 4 cancer patients.  Side effects of this pill are minimal.  When we find out what the results of the PET scan are, we will post an update.  Keep the prayers coming.  Thank you for all of your well wishes.
Carrie Kafentzis