Blood in urine, freaking out!

Hello cgbee. Sorry for the delay in writing. I don't come here as often as I did before.

Yes. While blood in the urine can be a sign of kidney cancer, it can also be other things. When I was going to a urologist, I was told that something as simple as running long distances on a regular basis can cause people to have blood in the urine.

When you see your primary care physician, it's likely he (or she) will have you get a CT scan. Those seem to give the greatest detail for examination of the kidneys and that will tell you if it's actually the stone causing the problem, or some other issue.

Now, even if it turns out to be kidney cancer (otherwise known as RCC or renal cell carcinoma), it's very treatable. Surgery is the gold standard of treatment, but, depending on the size and location in the kidney, it's possible to have minimally invasive surgery (which I had in June, 2016) or a technique called ablation. In ablation (typically done on an outpatient basis), long, thin needles are inserted through the skin and into the kidney. The tips of these needles are then either superheated (RF or radio frequency ablation) or supercooled (cryoablation) and the lesion is either cooked or frozen, thereby killing it. Ablation has about a 90% success rate in eradicating the disease entirely, while surgery is close to 100% successful. Again, the success rate of both is dependent on the size and location of a lesion.

I was 60 at the time of my surgery. I chose surgery over ablation because of the higher success rate (although ablation can be repeated) and because my urologist and the surgeon I had both said I was in fantastic physical condition, so the surgery would not be an issue. They typically recommend ablation for less healthy patients. The surgery was minimally invasive, was robotic assisted and was a partial nephrectomy.....only a small part of my kidney got taken out. (If the whole kidney were to be removed, it would be called a radical nephrectomy.) My surgery started at 3PM (which made for a very stressful day) and I was released from the hospital the next day at 1:30PM. I had little to no post-op pain and my wife and I were in Japan for a 17 day trip less than three months later, so recuperation wasn't very difficult, at least compared to stomach surgeries I've had in the past.

So, blood in the urine isn't something to be taken lightly. So it's good you're having a followup appoint with your own doctor. But for peace of mind, ask for a CT scan. And if you need any other information, don't hesitate to respond.