Our prayers are with Kurt for this journey. Dale's sister was given the same
diagnosis about 8 years ago, and she has done amazingly. They removed her
kidney, and has had no complications at all. She has frequent follow ups, but
is doing great. It does sound scary, but it really has a great recovery rate.
Arlene
________________________________
From: geocaching-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <geocaching-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> on
behalf of Susan Ring <susanmring@xxxxxxx>
Sent: Friday, August 4, 2017 2:50 PM
To: geocaching@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [GeoStL] Some news about rocfish (Kurt Stoeppelman)
I don’t know how many folks still get these messages but I’m going to throw
this out here and then try to catch others by email or gc.com<http://gc.com>
messaging.
Kurt recently found out that he has stage 3 renal cancer. I know that sounds
really bad, but the prognosis is actually pretty good. It's completely
contained within his kidney, so they are just going to remove that kidney plus
its associated adrenal gland. Luckily, both kidneys and adrenal glands come in
pairs.
He didn't have any symptoms related to the tumor. He ended up in the hospital
for an unrelated GI problem and they found it in a CT scan of his abdomen-so a
really lucky catch. It's early enough that there won't be any follow up
treatment after the surgery-no chemo or radiation.
I'm sending this news out to the "old-timers" who know Kurt. A lot of newer
folks don't know who he is. Kurt is not crazy about this info getting out on
Facebook, so please honor his preference.
We just had lunch yesterday and he is in good spirits. His surgery is on August
18. He'll be in the hospital for 3-5 days. He's already made sure that someone
will take him outside the hospital on eclipse day so he doesn't miss it.
He also told me that he's starting to think about cutting back on work and
eventual retirement and that means more geocaching. He's been pretty much out
of the game for a while. So I told him that when he's ready, we'll have an
event somewhere that has good gluten free food (he's got celiac disease) and
folks can catch up with him.
I'll keep you all informed when I get updates on how he's doing.
Susan
