Jim Walts

Dad had been doing a lot of remodeling work at church, playing, softball, golf, and going to the weight room. Perfectly fine. No worries.Then, after a softball game, his back was hurting and he had some bad swelling in his legs. Everyone, including doctors, thought it was merely swelling, required only compression socks and rest, and would go away in time. Wrong.

On Sunday, 29th May, he was feeling really weak, so Mom took him to the emergency room. After a CT scan, the doctors discovered that he had what they thought was a blood clot/clots all the way down both legs and up to his heart. They put him on a lot of heparin to try to dissolve the clot and did surgery with the idea of removing it on Tuesday, 31 May. They removed a lot of tissue, but what came out looked "weird" according to the doctors. They knew it was cancerous then, but didn't know what kind or where the tumor was. He had an MRI on 1 June and they found a mass on his liver. It's hepatocelluar carcinoma and it looks like what happened is it slowly spread through the inferior vena cava and the veins in his lower body. He never had any symptoms of reduced liver function and still doesn't, which is good.


The results from the MRI showed that the tumor is on one side of his liver. It is in the big vein behind the liver and the veins going up to his heart and down to his legs.

We would have been less surprised if US Men's National Soccer Team had won the World Cup in 2014. If you know anything about soccer, that's saying a lot.