The Middle-Aged Genius’s Guide to Almost Everything 52 – Kidney Cancer 1A
June 23, 2020
[Beginning of recorded material]
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: You had cancer. What type of cancer?
Rick Rosner: 15-and-a-half months ago, I was thinking of my father-in-law who died of pancreatic cancer, which is s tough cancer because it causes no cancer until it is too late. It is not really a cancer any worse than any other cancer if it is caught early. But it is never caught early.
It is only caught by luck early because it doesn’t cause any symptoms. Because of that, I though they should take a look inside of me. I thought it would be possible to get them to take a look inside me for no reason.
I started with blood tests. My blood numbers are often a little off. Because I work out all the time, five times a day. At the time, I was trying to do 200 sets per day. These aren’t the craziest sets to exhaustion like a power lifter.
Power lifters try to do as few sets as possible to preserve strength and bulk. A power lifting workout can be as few as ten or twelve sets. My OCD workouts are a bunch of not too arduous sets.
In any case, I haven’t taken a break from the gym in 29 years. This many workouts and sets means my kidney numbers were off. When you workout like that, you generate a lot of muscle waste, which is one measure of kidney function.
The bad blood numbers led them to give me an ultrasound. They found a 3-centimetre tumour in my kidney and they took it out, but that is for your kidney. It’s stage 1a. Anything below 4 centimetres is considered not scary by doctors.
Of course, they’re not the ones with the tumour. Cancer is 4 stages. Stage 4 is the most dire of course. Stage 1 is the least. I had stage 1a. It is stage 1 for kidney cancer for tumours up to 7 centimetres. Mine was 3. The odds I have of occurrence within the next 10 years are less than 10%.
So, it’s not great to have had cancer, but this wasn’t the worst to happen. They operated just over a year ago because I had to wait two months, two and a half months. My surgeon likes to see the robotic surgeon that you see at Ronald Reagan Medical Centre.
Kidney cancer grows so slow that my doctor made me wait two months. I didn’t like it. But I went with it because my doctor seems competent. The tumour may have shrunken a little bit. Because when they first measured it, it was 3-and-a-half centimetres.
It is hard to tell. Then I started taking fisetin. I did home-made chemo. Fisetin is a natural supplement that is known for having a bunch of pathways for killing senile cells. A senolytic is a drug that makes cells that should be dead, in your body, die.
So, they don’t clog up your body. After taking a shitload of that, more than 100 doses, my tumour that was originally 3-and-a-half centimetres when they took it out of me was 3 centimetres. It may be an error in measurement with ultrasound, which isn’t that precise as a measurement.
It’s not a thing that they give you chemo for. If you’re lucky, they don’t give chemo for kidney cancer because the chemo for kidney cancer isn’t that effective. It is for people of much later stages when it is metastasized.
I am hoping that it doesn’t come back for, at least, 10 years. I am hoping in the next ten years that they come up with a bunch of stuff to fight it. It makes me worried that I’ve polluted myself by taking too many supplements.
Or that I’ve fucked up my kidneys by working out too much and they have to process so much muscle waste. Anyway, that’s it.
Jacobsen: What about some of the issues around rest and recovery?
Rosner: I don’t particularly want to talk about it, because I don’t think it is interesting.
Jacobsen: Why don’t you take days off to rest?
Rosner: Because fuck it, a) I don’t do a lot of sets, b) I don’t destroy myself. I am 60-years-old. Unless, I do something new. I don’t do things that leave me sore the next day. When I was half my current age, I would do chest workouts where I would hold out my chest.
I would hold my pecks, so they didn’t jiggle. Because they hurt. After being a reasonably little guy, I am a relatively little guy at 5 foot 10 and a half. I am pretty reasonable about it. I did, once my kidneys came back looking not great, switch from working out each muscle, which is not productive when you’re trying to get big to having push days and pull days, bicep and back days.
Which seems to, maybe, have helped my kidney numbers a little bit, going to the gym every day is doing it half-assedly, it is something I do. I have a streak of many decades. If that keeps me motivated to keep going, that’s a good thing.
I’ve only missed 55 days since late August, 1984. It’s that I like keeping the freakin’ streak going.
Jacobsen: Okay.
[End of recorded material]
Authors[1]
American Television Writer
(Updated July 25, 2019)
*High range testing (HRT) should be taken with honest skepticism grounded in the limited empirical development of the field at present, even in spite of honest and sincere efforts. If a higher general intelligence score, then the greater the variability in, and margin of error in, the general intelligence scores because of the greater rarity in the population.*
According to some semi-reputable sources gathered in a listing here, Rick G. Rosner may have among America’s, North America’s, and the world’s highest measured IQs at or above 190 (S.D. 15)/196 (S.D. 16) based on several high range test performances created by Christopher Harding, Jason Betts, Paul Cooijmans, and Ronald Hoeflin. He earned 12 years of college credit in less than a year and graduated with the equivalent of 8 majors. He has received 8 Writers Guild Awards and Emmy nominations, and was titled 2013 North American Genius of the Year by The World Genius Directory with the main “Genius” listing here.
He has written for Remote Control, Crank Yankers, The Man Show, The Emmys, The Grammys, and Jimmy Kimmel Live!. He worked as a bouncer, a nude art model, a roller-skating waiter, and a stripper. In a television commercial, Domino’s Pizza named him the “World’s Smartest Man.” The commercial was taken off the air after Subway sandwiches issued a cease-and-desist. He was named “Best Bouncer” in the Denver Area, Colorado, by Westwood Magazine.
Rosner spent much of the late Disco Era as an undercover high school student. In addition, he spent 25 years as a bar bouncer and American fake ID-catcher, and 25+ years as a stripper, and nearly 30 years as a writer for more than 2,500 hours of network television. Errol Morris featured Rosner in the interview series entitled First Person, where some of this history was covered by Morris. He came in second, or lost, on Jeopardy!, sued Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? over a flawed question and lost the lawsuit. He won one game and lost one game on Are You Smarter Than a Drunk Person? (He was drunk). Finally, he spent 37+ years working on a time-invariant variation of the Big Bang Theory.
Currently, Rosner sits tweeting in a bathrobe (winter) or a towel (summer). He lives in Los Angeles, California with his wife, dog, and goldfish. He and his wife have a daughter. You can send him money or questions at LanceVersusRick@Gmail.Com, or a direct message via Twitter, or find him on LinkedIn, or see him on YouTube.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen
Founder, In-Sight Publishing
Footnotes
[1] Four format points for the session article:
- Bold text following “Scott Douglas Jacobsen:” or “Jacobsen:” is Scott Douglas Jacobsen & non-bold text following “Rick Rosner:” or “Rosner:” is Rick Rosner.
- Session article conducted, transcribed, edited, formatted, and published by Scott.
- Footnotes & in-text citations in the interview & references after the interview.
- This session article has been edited for clarity and readability.
For further information on the formatting guidelines incorporated into this document, please see the following documents:
- American Psychological Association. (2010). Citation Guide: APA. Retrieved from http://www.lib.sfu.ca/system/files/28281/APA6CitationGuideSFUv3.pdf.
- Humble, A. (n.d.). Guide to Transcribing. Retrieved from http://www.msvu.ca/site/media/msvu/Transcription%20Guide.pdf.
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Rick Rosner 