Last summer, my doctor told me I would probably be dead before my son went to college. At the time, my son was one day from turning 14, one month away from starting high school.

I had gone to the doctor a few days earlier with what I thought were kidney stones, for which I had all the symptoms, including, if you must know, blood in my urine. The scans turned up kidney cancer instead — Stage IV. "

cancer," said our longtime family doctor, explaining that my left kidney was essentially a

and that it had spread to my liver, lymph nodes, the inferior vena cava, which carries blood to the heart, and, likely, my thyroid.

Bad luck, because kidney cancer often doesn't show itself until it's too late.

"We're going to beat this," my mom remembers saying to my dad and wife and me when we walked out of the office. I thought, They're going to have to bury me.

Mom made some panicked calls to a friend at UT Southwestern, and 24 hours later I had an appointment with Dr. Vitaly Margulis, an associate professor of urology and a cancer surgeon who, I was told, is "very aggressive" — he likes to cut. Just not on me. Margulis said surgery would not help. The cancer was too widespread. Trying to remove the tumor thrombus in the interior vena cava alone would probably kill me.

1 / 2So this is where they took out the kidney and lymph node and other insides that weren't supposed to ever see the outside ... (and posing for these photographs was almost as painful as the surgery itself) ...(Carly Geraci / Staff Photographer) 2 / 2And this is where they scooped out some of the liver. (Carly Geraci / Staff Photographer)

Here's the thing. That was a summer ago. Today, I no longer have an expiration date.

That is the only reason I am writing this. I have no great interest in sharing my tale of woe. You have enough on your plates without having to concern yourself with my ills. But I do think it's worth noting that in a year's time, I went from inoperable to having this shark-attack incision across the width of my abdomen. A chevron, it's called — a forever reminder of the six hours surgeons spent carving out my left kidney, chunks of liver and other bits to which

had metastasized.

I wanted you to know this, because maybe out of nowhere, someone will also tell you there is a tumor in your body that is doing a very good job of murdering you, and I want you to know it might be OK after all.

Shell-shocked and struggling

My death sentence was commuted by something called

RADVAX

— a clinical trial in its second phase being run by

Dr. Hans Hammers

, a recent Johns Hopkins transplant to UT Southwestern. It combines two drugs you might have seen advertised on TV, Opdivo

Yervoy, with a few shots of radiation.

Dr. Hans Hammers, associate professor of internal medicine and co-leader of the Kidney Cancer Program at UT Southwestern Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center, saved my life. No big deal. (Special contributor / Ben Torres)

This is what they call immunotherapy. Use the laser to kill some of the tumor, then use the drugs to tell the body to go sniff out those dead cells and attack the cancer. The hope is the combination will keep the tumors in check and stop them from spreading or, even better, shrink the tumors altogether and maybe even kill a few in the process.

"These drugs take the brakes off the immune system," Hammers told me. "That's the rationale for combining them with radiation. Don't just take the brakes off, but stimulate the response."

I called Hammers this week to talk about what I'd been through, because I will be honest: I did no research on RADVAX or Hammers or kidney cancer or anything when Margulis, the surgeon, sent me to see Hammers, the researcher, and told me Hans was my only hope.

I tried to keep a diary; I recorded a couple of meetings. But I was a bad journalist. I didn't Google anything or go to Half-Price Books and buy a dozen texts on kidney cancer. The most I did was call two M.D. buddies, who are not oncologists, and ask them questions, the answers to which I'm pretty sure they Googled.

Mostly I just wanted to know I'd made the right decision to stay in Dallas, at UT Southwestern, rather than schlep down to the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, which is where my late colleague Jeff Weiss had gone when he was diagnosed with glioblastoma in late 2016. My doctor friends told me to stay put.

I did not want to know any more because I did not need to know. And, I was terrified. If the trial worked, fantastic — maybe I'd get a few more years. And if it didn't, I thought why waste the time researching and chronicling my own demise when I could be throwing the baseball with my son.

For one whole year I just did what Hans Hammers told me. Spent days in scanning machines. Had vials of blood drawn every week. Let them pump me full of drugs whose names I could never remember. Laid in the radiation machine for an hour with my arms over my head while they killed some of the kidney tumor. It was a blur.

Hammers said most of his patients are like me: '"shell-shocked and struggling to decide which way to go." We do what we're told, because we do not want to die.

I was No. 10 in Hammers' trial out of the 25 patients he is seeking. I signed the consent papers around this time last August. I don't think I read them except for the part about how I might get diabetes or Crohn's or just die as a side effect of the trial, and I was OK with that. There are now 19 in Hammers' RADVAX trial, with two more about to sign up.

The trial is being funded by the Kidney Cancer Coalition out of Virginia Beach, VA, founded by Ralph and Brenda Knapp. Ralph was a patient of Hammers' just as he was trying to launch the RADVAX study. The doc had the drugs, provided by Bristol-Myers Squibb, just not the funding — the feds and the pharmaceutical company wouldn't cough up a cent. So the Knapps raised the money themselves — $300,000.

Hammers, who speaks with a lilting German accent, started out researching blood vessels and cancer after he read a 1998 New York Times article about a revolutionary treatment that might "eradicate any type of cancer" by cutting off the blood flow to tumors. But, eventually, he switched to kidney cancer. And it was hard, he told me.

Bad luck, good timing

Before 2006, most far-along kidney cancer patients lived maybe a year after diagnosis, which meant most of his patients died. Then came Sutent, the pill that extended some lives, and "there was a glimpse of something people could work with," he said.

Above are two views of my left kidney, which, if this makes any sense at all, is the mass on the right-hand side of these scans. The July 2017 scan shows a kidney that's essentially one large tumor. Almost a year later, after the RADVAX trial, the tumor began to shrink, revealing some normal kidney tissue. I no longer have that kidney. (Courtesy Dr. Hans Hammers)

At the beginning of this decade, doctors began using Opdivo and Yervoy, separately and together, to treat all kinds of cancers — first skin, then liver, lung. There were several iterations of the RADVAX trial, with limited positive results. Hammers said that around a dozen of the 100 participants in a 2014 trial, which involved the drugs but not the radiation, are faring well three years later. Their tumors are holding steady; they don't need further therapy, yet.

It's far too early to know how my class will fare. But I was fortunate. I could endure only two of the four drug infusions the trial called for. After the second in early October, the Opdivo and Yervoy began attacking my good kidney, and I spent months gobbling a Russian Olympic team's worth of high-dosage steroids and other drugs to slow down my ramped-up immune system.

But scans and biopsies done in the spring revealed that even two doses had done the trick. My liver tumors were believed dead, and the others were now contained enough to remove.

And above is my liver, which fills almost the entire left-hand side of the scan. As you can see in July 2017 the liver was full of tumors. By May 2018, the tumors were considered necrotic — dead, essentially. (Courtesy Dr. Hans Hammers)

"As unlucky as you were to get cancer," Hammer told me this week, "you were lucky enough to get it in a way the immune system could work with it."

And so, on June 19,

Dr. Adam Yopp

removed part of my liver, after which Vitaly Margulis finally got his hands in me. After which I sat in a chair and watched a lot of

because it's impossible to cry during pastry week.

There are still more biopsies in my future; maybe a surgery, too. And now, every three months I will be scanned to see if

has returned. Because, I am discovering, you don't really survive cancer so much as you just try to outrun it. But of this much I am certain: Twelve months ago, I knew I'd never see my son go off to college. And now, at least, I have that chance, because Stage IV kidney cancer is no longer certain death.

"Exactly," said Hans Hammers, the man who saved my life.