Tim Reilly

Welcome to our CaringBridge website. We are using it to keep family and friends updated in one place. We appreciate your support and words of hope and encouragement. Thank you for visiting. Tim was in the hospital on April 25th he was was having pain radiating down his arm and tightness in his chest.  The doctors at Methodist ran several tests, such as blood work, MRI, CT scan EkG and ultra sound.   He had told them he was sore on the upper right abdomen ( we thought might be from bariatric surgery he had In December ) What they found was a mass on his kidney.  In further scans of that they noticed that this mass had grown and was not only on his kidney, but traveled up his inferior vena cava (which is a major pathway that returns the blood to the heart) and in the liver and leading up to his heart. His lymph nodes are swollen as well.  This finding is what they call Renial Cell Carcinoma.  Yes that is cancer at stage 3.  Tim will be getting an additional MRI of the brain , to rule out that cancer may have spread to the brain. That test will be done at the U of M we hope within the week , then moving forward in the next 2 weeks he should have surgery at the U of M (as they see this type of case more then Methodist does) . The surgery will remove the tumor, kidney, lymph nodes and part of his liver and adrenal glan on the affected kidney. After that it looks like either chemo or radiation due to lymph nodes being swollen they will also biopsy them to determine if cancer is in lymph nodes.  The doctor said that the only thing that acts like this is the Renial Cell Carcinoma. On a positive note his other kidney is functioning  at 100% so that is great , as well as they think once they remove the cancer from the inferior vena cava IVC that might help with his heart issues as will allow him to get more blood back to the heart. 
 We are asking for your support and prayers at this time and will keep you updated  on is site as we hear anything.