Kidney cancer survivor raises money for support fund to help cancer patients in need

To be a Messervy in Summerville, South Carolina, is to be part of a family that values public service and community involvement – so much so that Dorchester County recently renamed part of the county administrative complex “Messervy Square” in honor of the family’s eight decades of service to the town and county.

JJ Messervy has upheld the family tradition as the elected county auditor, a dedicated supporter of Dorchester Paws, an announcer for the Summerville Green Wave and an indefatigable raiser of funds for community causes. A self-proclaimed “mean guy,” he’s nonetheless everywhere that the community needs him.

But while he is a well-known figure around Summerville, his own diagnosis of cancer was not. Not until he decided to do what he does best, that is – raise money for a community cause.

Messervy decided to use his annual birthday fundraiser to raise money for the patient support fund at MUSC Hollings Cancer Center. He raised more than $20,000 for the fund, which offers assistance to patients with financial need, ranging from help with groceries and utilities to help covering the cost of transportation to the cancer center and lodging nearby.

A family trip and a shocking diagnosis

Messervy has been trying to spend more quality time with his two sons, ages 14 and 9, so they and other family members headed to Colorado last December for a ski trip.

He immediately felt ill. His older sister told him to suck it up – it was just altitude sickness. But Messervy felt worse and worse until he finally ended up at an urgent care center.

“As I walked in, they did not even make me sign in. I never said anything, but I had that look on my face. They just opened the door and within a few minutes they had called 911. My blood pressure was just ridiculous,” he said.

Messervy was transported to the nearest hospital. By himself in a hospital bed while his sister got everyone situated in the rental house, he heard news that seemed incomprehensible.

“The doctor comes in and says, ‘Mr. Messervy, I have some bad news. You have a strangulated hernia that needs emergency surgery or you will die.

“‘And you have advanced kidney cancer.’”

Kidney cancer is the 7th most common cancer in the U.S., but it’s most often diagnosed in people between the ages of 65 and 74. Other risk factors include obesity, smoking or a family history. Messervy has never smoked, doesn’t have a family history that he knows of and, at 42, had become part of a small group of people in their late 30s and early 40s who account for a mere 1.5% of all kidney cancer patients.

Looking up at the doctor, Messervy asked, “How do you know? Don't we need to do some science-y stuff? Don't we need to cut it up and see what's in it?”

(Anyone who has met Messervy will know that “stuff” was not actually the word that he used. His vocabulary is as forceful as his zeal for catching those who don’t pull their weight in funding local schools by evading vehicles taxes).

“And she said, ‘Well Mr. Messervy, normally we do, but benign things don't spread.’ And I was like, ‘That is a great yet horrible answer.’”

Far from home, Messervy underwent surgery for the hernia, but he didn’t tell the boys about the cancer diagnosis.

“I wanted to wait for that pathology to come back. If I was going to die, I wanted to be able to tell my children I was going to die. And if I was going to be able to be treated, I didn’t want that weighing on them,” he said.

While still in the hospital in Colorado, his family reached out to Hollings and got connected with Stephen J. Savage, M.D., who specializes in minimally invasive techniques for urologic cancers. Savage and Kim Stewart, R.N., genitourinary cancer nurse navigator, obtained Messervy’s CT scans from Colorado so they could bring them to the multidisciplinary tumor board for discussion of the best path forward.

Before Messervy even set foot in Hollings, the team had developed a plan of action that included laparoscopic left kidney and adrenal surgery performed by Savage, to be followed by drug therapy with the medical oncology team.

Return to South Carolina

After two emergency surgeries in Colorado – the second prompted by hemorrhaging after the first – Messervy slumped back to South Carolina on Jan. 1 and to his first appointment at Hollings on Jan. 9, where he met Hayley Atkins Smith, a physician assistant on the genitourinary cancer team. She discussed the plan with him as well as genetic testing, given his young age for cancer presentation.

Messervy wasn’t thrilled with the idea of removing a kidney, but a second opinion at Duke Cancer Center reconciled him to the idea.

“If someone were 75 and had what I had, they wouldn't have cut him. They would have treated it and figured that you're going to die of something else before you die of cancer,” Messervy said. “But I was so young, they had to.”

On Jan. 16, Savage removed Messervy’s left kidney and left adrenal gland using a minimally invasive approach. Although they’d hoped to also remove the right adrenal gland, they couldn’t because of the staples remaining in Messervy's abdomen from the surgeries in Colorado.

Throughout this time, his children knew only that Messervy was being treated for a hernia. He didn’t want them to worry about the cancer.

“Their only interaction with cancer was when my father died,” explained Messervy, whose father, James Messervy, died in 2022 of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

But in February, after the pathology report came back from the lab, Messervy finally had some solid answers to give to his boys. He explained what he had – Stage 4 renal cell carcinoma – and the treatment plan, which included the targeted cancer drug Inlyta and the immunotherapy drug Keytruda.

He would also undergo another surgery over the summer to remove the right adrenal gland – an action necessary to remove the last remaining visible cancer but one that also left his body unable to produce important hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.

Life without adrenal glands

Adrenal glands, each of which sits atop a kidney, produce and release hormones that regulate functions like blood pressure, heart rate, metabolism and stress response.

Without them, Messervy must take synthetic hormones for the rest of his life and be diligent about his health.

“You have to constantly be hydrating because dehydration equals death. That’s one of the things they tell you. When you’re sick and you don’t have adrenal glands, you have to ramp up your medicine because your body needs the help to fight it. If I get the stomach bug, I go directly to the emergency room because that can kill you, the dehydration,” he said.

Messervy has also dealt with joint pain as a side effect from his cancer medication and with fatigue that he is learning to manage.

“I've never really been tired consistently in my life. I've always just gone, gone, gone,” he said. “The success I’ve had in life has been because of hard work and always trying to do my best like I was taught. And I had a gear that other people couldn't find because I could just keep going – or that’s what I told myself. And I don’t have that anymore.”

Overall, though, he feels like he’s doing OK.

“Every doctor I go to says, ‘You look great.’ Even the endocrinologist is like, ‘This is amazing, how well you’re doing,’” he said.

The cancer team tells him there is no evidence of disease.

A fundraiser to help other cancer patients

When Messervy finally told his close friend, Tom Limehouse, about his cancer diagnosis, Limehouse urged him to start a fundraiser for cancer. But Messervy just wasn’t up for it.

“All I've done my whole life is raise money for other causes, and I need to take care of myself,” he told his friend.

He was tired.

But one day at Hollings, he started chatting with another patient, a 30-something who had spent months in and out of the hospital for a bone marrow transplant.

“He mentioned the patient support fund. So I read up on it and I'm like, ‘OK, well, I don't need help paying my bills, and I have insurance. I've got all this stuff going for me. But you know what? That has inspired me to do this,’” he said.

A few years ago, Messervy had started doing a Facebook birthday fundraiser for Dorchester Paws, the animal shelter in Dorchester County. This year, he decided to direct the funds to the Hollings Patient Support Fund – but that meant telling everyone about his cancer.

In a series of Facebook posts, he told the whole story of his diagnosis and treatment. Some family members had agreed to chip in and offer matches, and Limehouse promised $5,000 if he reached his goal. Ultimately, with the help of 150 donors, he raised more than $20,000. And to ensure that Dorchester Paws wasn’t forgotten, he and his mother each gave $1,000 to the animal shelter.

Taking it slow – maybe

“I love my job. I get up excited to go to work every day, and I really feel bad at times that I like my job so much and other people don't like theirs,” Messervy said.

That translated into him returning to work too early after the first cancer surgery, he admitted. He learned his lesson for the second cancer surgery, even though he itched to get back.

“My dad would always say, ‘The place is not going to fall down if you're not there,’” he said. “I felt like I was going to fall down if I wasn't there.

“So I'm trying to take a little bit more time with stuff. I'm trying not to engage myself in as many things – though I'm not having as much success as I would like.”

Always a helper, this journey put Messervy on the receiving end of help, showing him how much it means when people act. He’s eternally grateful to everyone who stepped up, from the medical team to family and friends to those who donated to his Facebook fundraiser. Without them, he couldn’t have gotten to this point, relatively healthy and focused on spending time with his boys.

“I've made more of a priority to do things with my children that I hadn't done before. I just really want to devote myself to spending time with them.”

And he’s not going anywhere any time soon, he says. Mean people live forever.

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