It was a normal Thursday for Susan Roddy, or so she thought. As 79-year-old Susan was getting ready for her volunteer job at Saddleback Medical Center, she knew something was not right. She discovered blood in her urine and was nearly doubled over with pain in her abdomen.
Instead of assisting patients’ family members and friends waiting for their loved ones to come out of surgery, Susan found herself in the emergency room at Saddleback Medical Center where fellow volunteers dressed in their “aloha shirt” uniforms came to visit her. In her words, “it was like we were at a luau.”
She had a CT scan done, underwent a series of tests, and spent four nights under observation at the hospital. It was determined that Susan had a cancerous tumor on one of her kidneys. A few weeks later her kidney was removed and Susan is now cancer free. Her urologist Moses M. Kim, MD was able to remove all the cancer and did not feel she needed to undergo chemotherapy or radiation treatments.
Susan is enjoying life with her husband Bill and back to doing her daily water aerobics and volunteering in the family surgery waiting area at Saddleback Medical Center. She is grateful for not only the high-tech equipment used to find her tumor, but for the caring technicians and physicians who ran the tests and went to great lengths to figure out what was wrong.