Grand Central Station and How a Tumor Saved My Life
This is a guest post by Byron Olsen, 58. Byron is a patient attorney and lawyer who was diagnosed with stage 4 clear cell renal cell carcinoma in 2025. He lives in Massachusetts with his wife and has three adult children.
In late September 2025, I was on a train pulling into Grand Central Station to visit two of my children in New York City when my dermatologist called.
He did not have good news.
A few months earlier, I had been treated for a small basal cell carcinoma on my cheek. I thought that was the end of my cancer story. Then, just before my three-month follow-up, I noticed what looked like an inflamed cyst or gland above my right eyebrow. It kept growing. By the time I saw my dermatologist, it was clearly not behaving normally. He thought it might be an angioma, but when he treated it, it bled heavily. He stopped, looked more closely, and decided to biopsy it.
The results took longer than expected because, as he later told me, they were so unexpected that he had them checked again.
As my train arrived at Track 30, he told me the biopsy showed clear cell renal cell carcinoma — kidney cancer.
I could not speak. I leaned against one of the concrete pillars on the platform because I was afraid I might fall. Around me, Grand Central Station was full of movement: people rushing, trains arriving, announcements echoing. But for me, everything stopped.
In those first moments, I thought my life was over.
Why? Part of the reason was that I knew just enough to be terrified. I have a master’s degree in cell biology, and when I was trained, metastatic renal cell carcinoma had a vastly different prognosis than it does today. It was a death sentence. In my mind, I immediately saw the weddings I would not attend, the grandchildren I would never hold, and the family moments I would miss. I was 58 years old, and suddenly the future I had assumed was mine – just disappeared.
But that strange, ugly tumor over my eyebrow may have saved my life.
How? Kidney cancer is often silent. It can grow quietly inside the body for years before anyone knows it is there. My eyebrow lesion was different. It was visible. It was impossible to ignore. It was, in the bluntest possible way, a big red ugly warning sign that something seriously wrong was happening inside me.
Soon afterward, my wife brought me to Dana-Farber. I say “brought” because at that point I was still carrying around my own grim diagnosis in my head. She wanted me to hear from actual kidney cancer experts, with actual MD’s, not from the frightened version of myself who thought he already knew how the story ended.
That visit changed everything.
My doctor talked about imaging, CT scans, immunotherapy, treatment options, and clinical trials. For the first time since the diagnosis, I felt something I had not expected to feel again: hope.
By then, the tumor above my eye had grown enough that it was pushing against my glasses. I wanted it removed. My doctor smiled and suggested starting immunotherapy instead.
A week later, I began treatment.
What happened next still amazes me. The tumor over my eyebrow began to change. At first, I noticed my glasses were no longer being pushed out of place. Then the tumor changed color, from red to an angry purple. Then it began to shrink.
As a scientist, I understood what immunotherapy was supposed to do. It does not simply poison cancer cells in the old way people often imagine cancer treatment. It helps the immune system recognize cancer as something that does not belong. It helps the body see the enemy. The tumor cells don’t get to remain invisible anymore.
But as a patient, I was watching that happen in real time.
That eyebrow tumor became a window into the battle inside my body. Every week it looked a little smaller. Every change gave me courage. The thing I had hated became, strangely, a source of hope. It literally made the science visible. It showed me that the treatment was doing something. It helped me believe that my immune system, with the help of modern medicine, was fighting back. It was as if God himself had given me a window into the fight my body was engaged in – now that it could see the tumors, and there was hope.
By Christmas, the tumor was completely gone. No scar. Just remodeled skin — and, for a while, there was a lot of itching.
I know cancer is not linear. I know there are no guarantees. But today my total tumor burden has been reduced by more than 70%. The spots in my lungs have cleared. Other tumors are nearly resolved, and even the primary tumor in my right kidney has significantly decreased in size. The eyebrow tumor is gone, and I do not miss it, but I still look at that spot in the mirror every day and remember the blessing in disguise that it was.
I went from preparing to die to planning for the future.
That does not mean cancer has made life simple. It has not. But it has made certain things clearer. My family’s love and stubbornness mattered. My friends and community around me mattered. Science and research mattered. Skilled physicians, nurses, researchers, clinical trials, and decades of medical progress mattered. Hope mattered and medical science had vastly improved.
If I could say one thing to someone newly diagnosed, it would be this: do not let the first terrible moments become the whole story. Get to experts. Ask questions. Let people help you. And remember that the treatment landscape today may be very, very different from the one you fear. The one that I thought existed was gone.
I am now excited to advocate for medical science, for research, for kidney cancer awareness, and for better ways to detect this disease before it becomes metastatic. I am also excited to keep working out, to keep showing up for my family, and to keep planning for a future that once seemed to vanish on a train platform underneath NYC.
But I may not ride the Acela to New York again…and my wife still thinks I should change dermatologists.