My Life (1993) and Advanced Kidney Cancer

Bob Jones is a Los Angeles public relations executive who has spent his adult life editing away his origins: he was born Bob Ivanovich to Ukrainian immigrant parents in Detroit and has barely spoken to his family in years. He is diagnosed with advanced kidney cancer and told he has months, just as his wife Gail becomes pregnant with their first child. Rather than tell anyone, he buys a video camera and begins recording tapes for a son he does not expect to meet: how to shave, how to dribble a basketball, how to cook, what his father thought about things. Gail discovers the illness and forces it into the open. Bob turns to an unlicensed Chinese healer, Mr Ho, whose sessions do nothing to the tumours but crack open a lifetime of buried rage. He returns to Detroit for the fight and then the reconciliation, and rides the roller coaster he was too frightened to ride as a boy. The baby, Brian, is born. The cancer reaches Bob's brain and he dies at home with his family around him. The film closes on Gail and Brian watching the tapes.

Spoilers throughout. Discussing the cancer storyline means discussing how this ends.

The videotapes are the truest thing in it. Legacy work of exactly this kind, letters, recordings, memory boxes, is a real and actively encouraged part of palliative care for parents of young children, and the film understands why: it is as much about the dying parent needing somewhere to put what they know as about the child who will watch. It is also honest about anger. Bob is not serene; he is furious, controlling and spends much of his last months picking fights with the people who love him, which is far closer to how terminal illness actually lands than movie grace. The pull towards unproven healers once conventional medicine has run out is shown without mockery, and is extremely common. The film also understands that the dying often end up managing everyone else's feelings.

Bob's cancer functions as a schedule rather than a disease. He is diagnosed with widely advanced kidney cancer and then travels, argues, drives, rides a roller coaster and stays photogenic almost until his final scene, with occasional collapses inserted for structure. Brain metastases in reality bring headaches, seizures, weakness and confusion that would end a video project long before the film ends it. Treatment is essentially absent, with no oncologist of substance, no discussion of surgery, drugs or radiotherapy and no palliative team, because the screenplay is pursuing a spiritual arc rather than a clinical one. His death is calmer, tidier and less medicated than advanced cancer usually allows.

Kidney cancer is the film's diagnosis, and the most useful fact is that there is no screening test for it in people at average risk. NCI does not include kidney cancer among the cancers with recommended screening for the general population; surveillance imaging is reserved for people with inherited syndromes such as von Hippel-Lindau, a strong family history, or long-term dialysis. A great many kidney cancers are found by accident, on a CT or ultrasound ordered for something else entirely. Early kidney cancer usually causes nothing at all. NCI lists possible signs and symptoms as blood in the urine, a lump in the abdomen or side, a pain in the side that does not go away, loss of appetite, unexplained weight loss, and anaemia; fever and tiredness can also occur. These tend to appear once the tumour is larger, which is part of why some kidney cancers present late, as Bob's does. Blood in the urine, whether visible or found on a dipstick, should always be investigated, even if it happened only once, was painless, and has not come back. Smoking, high blood pressure and obesity are the main modifiable risk factors.

A film is not a diagnosis, and a dramatised illness is not a guide to your own. What a story like this is genuinely good for is lowering the barrier to a conversation you might otherwise put off.

If something in your body has changed and stayed changed for a few weeks, that is worth raising with a doctor — not because it is likely to be cancer, but because most of the time it will not be, and finding that out is the point. Where screening exists for a cancer, it is the one thing you can do before anything is wrong at all. See screening and possible warning signs.

Cancer Explained is free and ad-free. Nothing is sold on this page and no sponsor sits behind it.

If this helped you understand something, or moved you to ask a question you had been avoiding, you can help keep clear cancer information free for whoever needs it next. Support our work.

My Life is worth watching as a film. It is not a guide to the disease it portrays. The gap between the two is what this page is for — and the thing worth carrying away is that a change which persists is worth a conversation, whatever a story led you to expect.

This page describes a work of film or television for education. It is not medical advice, and nothing here is a judgement of anyone's real medical care. Spotted an error? Please email [email protected].