My urologist told me today he found several stones in my right kidney. It reminded me of this other experience I had with kidney stones.

“Thank God for the kidney stones” became a common refrain around my house in June and July of 2009.

My father’s kidney stones led to the CT scans that revealed a tumor, between two and three inches, in his kidney. The Trop family, relatively healthy despite a generation of reckless living, was not acquainted with medical emergencies, and we had to adjust our thinking to reflect that we had suddenly become a different kind of family.

My parents often looked at each other and welled up. My sisters were afraid. I was a wreck. I often left the office early because I couldn’t keep my mind on work or my eyes from tearing. I bristled when my editor asked me to write a business story on Father’s Day brunch reservations. How insensitive!

On the fateful day, we stood in his hospital room as they wheeled him into the O.R., my dad waving to us and trying to be brave in his green gown. We sat around for several hours. Eventually, he was wheeled back out, looking as though he’d been to hell and was not quite back.

I flew back to Detroit, my dad recovered and we sat tight until the biopsy could tell us whether the cancer had spread or had been contained within the now-removed kidney.

I called my parents frequently for an update. One day, my mother answered angrily.

“Ugh, don’t even talk to us,” she shrilled. “We are livid. WE ARE LIVID! The test results came back. It was benign, Your father never had cancer. Oh, we are so livid. WE ARE LIVID!”

She emphasized the words "benign" and "cancer" mockingly.

“But that’s great!” I said, nearly delirious with relief. “Can I talk to Dad?”

“No,” she said. “Your father is too upset to speak. WE ARE ABSOLUTELY LIVID!”

She hung up. My mind flashed back to the pain and silly platitudes of the previous four weeks.

The experience proved an exercise in manufacturing human emotions. Was everything a lie? We had been trying to be strong for... nothing.

So that’s how and why I ended up eating solitary Cheerios cross-legged on the floor alone in the dark in a questionable apartment on Jefferson Avenue.

I had subletted the apartment for the summer - from an allegedly reputable source, but that’s an entirely different story - sight unseen. It was not at all what I pictured from the... well... picture. There was none of the furniture, electricity, or riverfront ambiance the descriptor promised and certainly no one who could pass for a friendly neighbor.

Wheeling my luggage from the trunk of the Ford Focus to the seventh-floor apartment helped me work up an appetite, so I typed “supermarket” into my Magellan.

I found one just a third of a mile away. The thick black bars surrounding it gave it the appearance of being closed, but I peered in and saw that it was very much open. Unlike any food purveyor I had ever seen, it didn’t seem to have a whole lot and the food that was there looked to be past its prime.

I settled on a box of Cheerios, plastic utensils and bowls, and some stale bread and sliced turkey definitely past its prime. When I tried to pay with actual currency, the clerk looked at me strangely.

Oh, well, I thought. I guess that’s Detroit. And I drove one-third of a mile back to unpack my life for the next 12 weeks.

I closed the email without replying and briefly wondered if I should have played all of my interviews with nonchalance instead of enthusiasm. Then I forgot about the whole thing.

It was only January. Graduation was in May. There was plenty of time to find a job in New York, the city that was home to my friends, family and my... home.

School eventually started again, and I went to career services to chat with our director about future prospects. I paused in the door frame on my way out.

“Oh, I got this email from The Detroit News?” I said, as more of a question, really. “They asked if I wanted a summer internship.”

“Wait, what?” he straightened up behind his desk. “That’s great! Congratulations, kid! Why didn’t you say so before?”

“No,” I said. “I’m not taking it. I got the email like two weeks ago.”

“What!” he sputtered, turning red. “You don’t understand. That’s a great position. And the market is really bad out there. If you don’t take this, we can’t help you because there are so many other people we need to help who don’t have offers.”

“My life is here, I’m here, I have no desire to be in Detroit,” I said. “How can you just make me move?”

He shook his head.

I went home. With great difficulty, I typed:

“Dear Mr. Middlebrook, I would like to come to Detroit if the offer still stands”...

It was an interview unlike any other because I was precisely trying not to get hired.

I committed every interview sin short of putting one Kate Spade-clad foot on the table.

“Why do YOU think you can work at The Detroit News?” the recruiter challenged me.

“I don’t.”

He should have just abandoned the interview then, but he sensed a challenge and tried a different tack.

“Why do YOU want to work in DETROIT?”

“I don’t.”

“Do you have any interest in business reporting?”

“No.”

And so on and so forth.

A couple days later I got an email asking me if I’d like the highly-competitive position of summer intern on the paper’s business desk.

The move was supposed to be temporary - a 12-week summer internship before I could resume life in New York - and came about entirely accidentally.

Toward the end of winter break during my year at journalism school, I went to a two-day newspaper career fair sponsored by Newsday at the Marriott near LaGuardia airport. We submitted our resumes and registration fee in advance and received our interview schedule at check in. My memory of the interviews that first day is fuzzy, but I do remember showing my parents the list of papers I’d been matched with when I met them for dinner that night.

“Chicago Tribune, looks good,” my father said as he scanned the list. “Miami Herald, looks good. Detroit News. Don’t bother going to that one because there’s no way in hell you’re moving to Detroit. Sun Sentinel, looks good.”

The next day, Friday, several tables of classmates convalesced in the hotel’s banquet hall over lunch. We were three-quarters through the fair and getting loopy. I ate my penne with marinara sloppily, visions of going home in my head. I was speaking animatedly with a friend when I accidentally let go of my penne-laden fork. I only had one interview left - with The Detroit News - scheduled for right after lunch, so it was OK if the pasta landed on me, I told myself as I watched the fork’s slow-motion trajectory toward my white blouse. But, oddly enough, I caught it mid-air and resumed the bite.

Then there was an announcement that the second round of interviews was about to begin, and everyone else got up to finish the day. I sat in the hall alone, debating what to do.

My shirt was clean, so I went to the interview.

I knew something was off when I picked up my rental car and the Hertz guard insisted he had seen me in a Jack Black movie whose title he could not remember. “No, it wasn’t me,” I said. “Really, it wasn’t.” But my protests only cemented his belief I was a celebrity freshly arrived in Detroit and intent on going incognito.

He finally let me pass through the gate. What kind of a city was this? The kind where anyone wearing oversized tortoise shell sunglasses was a likely movie star, apparently. I didn’t know how to feel about that.

With my two suitcases in the back of my black Ford Focus (American-made: an entirely new experience for me), I pulled out my brand new Magellan and plugged the address of my Detroit sublet into the GPS.

It was a sunny June morning. I headed east along I-94 (though in those days, I couldn’t distinguish between east and west, north and south, up and down). Eventually, the city came into view. The futuristic set of cylinders known as the Renaissance Center pierced the landscape. My new home doesn’t look so bad, I thought.

But Magellan directed me past General Motors’ RenCen headquarters, further east along Jefferson Avenue, where the shiny compound gave way to old brick buildings. Then dilapidated brick buildings. Then condemned brick buildings. Then my brick building, buttressed with bullet-proof glass and a ring of onlookers whose open stares showed they were surprised to see me.

I never thought I’d move to Detroit. It was a far-off place, a Midwestern cliche referenced in old movies. I didn’t really even know what state it was in. Nor did I particularly care to find out.

I was a 25-year-old New Yorker through and through, living in a million-dollar aerie (by the accident of my birth to successful and generous parents and through no doing of my own) on the 23rd floor of a brand new Dumbo apartment building. The floor-to-ceiling windows showcased Manhattan (and Staten Island on a clear day) from the Statue of Liberty to the Empire State Building. I liked to gaze at my wedge of New York City from my living room. Cars shot across the Brooklyn Bridge, boats chugged along the East River and helicopters buzzed overhead. I threw some wicked parties while at Columbia Journalism School. I was home.

Then, one night, I was in Detroit, sitting cross-legged in front of a barred window in my sublet on Jefferson Avenue, eating Cheerios one-by-one from a disposable plastic bowl. In the dark. Because I had no electricity and no furniture. Everything had changed. I stared out into the spaces between the window’s thick black bars, too dumbfounded to be afraid, too homesick to cry.

This is my journey into the underbelly of Detroit.