A hopeful kidney donor never expected a routine screening to lead to a diagnosis for two separate cancers.

“It was a surprise, but I guess they say every cancer diagnosis is a surprise. It definitely wasn’t what I had expected,” Jeff Stewart said.

After years of working to control his weight and diabetes in order to qualify for donation, Stewart said he received the news in June 2022. Part of the dismay is due to the fact he has longed to be a donor for most of his life. 

“My first thought was kind of a disappointment, because it meant I couldn’t donate a kidney,” Stewart said.

Stewart was diagnosed with the most common form of kidney cancer, renal cell carcinoma. The Cleveland Clinic reports health care providers diagnose 80,000 new cases of RCC every year in the United States.

The stomach cancer was more advanced. The 51-year-old said his medical team told him he had stage 4 gastric adenocarcinoma.

“The type of cancer it is just spreads and replaces organs as it goes. It’s hard to spot,” Stewart said.

Dr. Hope Uronis is one of his oncologists.

“I don’t think I ever met anyone screening to become a donor and then found out they have cancer,” Uronis said. 

Uronis has worked in oncology for several years. 

Her first goal was to assemble a multidisciplinary medical village of support around him at the Duke Cancer Center.  

“We need to figure out what we are doing with kidney cancer. We need to figure out what we are doing with stomach cancer. We all had to come up within a vacuum what our plans would be and then figure out how our plans would come together,” she said.

She said without the kidney screening, catching stage 4 gastric adenocarcinoma would have been much more difficult. The American Cancer Society puts the lifetime risk of developing stomach cancer as being higher in men (about 1 in 96) than in women (about 1 in 152). 

Stewart’s treatment plan involved multiple medical specialists at the DCC. He described how the surgery to remove part of his stomach and intestine was on the same day a second medical team took out a tumor and a part of his kidney last fall.

“Surreal — I think that would be a good way to put it. There is a pattern to it that you get into, but your world also turns a little gray and small,” he said.

An intense regimen of chemotherapy followed the operations last fall, eventually combining rounds of chemo with radiation.

Stewart also decided to share his journey battling cancer with the world. He published “Living: Inspiration from a Father with Cancer.“

“I really hoped that people that had cancer or had somebody who had a friend or relative who had cancer and just didn’t know what to say, didn’t know what to talk about, that they could read the book and feel more comfortable knowing what to say, what to talk about, what the experience was like,” he said.

The first-person narrative details his fears, family conversations and finding hope in a time of heartache.

The book was also written from the perspective of a man who is a husband and father of seven children. He’s the first to admit there’s never a dull moment.

“Very, very quiet (here) mostly,” Stewart said.

The dad loves testing the limits of his mind and competed on TV quiz show “Jeopardy.” The Brigham Young University graduate won the college championship on “Jeopardy” in 1994.

The cancer patient also is a consultant on drugs and development for a life sciences company. He said his everyday job helped him when putting together the book.

“You have to turn that into a story, and that’s a performance, and people understand stories. People live and think as stories so you have to tell it as a story,” he said.

Part of his story are the nerves that come with his three-month checkups. He said on days of CT scans all he can think of is not knowing what the test could reveal.

“But if they ever tell me I’m not fine, then it means I’m dead, and I’m dead relatively quickly,” Stewart said.

His latest appointment yielded positive results with no clear sign of cancer spreading in his body.

The road of life includes so many unknowns, unlike the peace he finds walking around his neighborhood as a healthy escape.

“I think it makes me less depressed,” Stewart said.

Because like any family man, Stewart is trying to be the best version of himself he possibly can be for his children — no matter what comes next.

“Because I really did want to teach my kids as best I could how to live, how to live life,” Stewart said. “I want them to have the kind of things that helped me make my life less hard. A little bit of an owner’s manual on living life.”