We had a very quiet Thanksgiving (Bill's pills allow him to drift off occasionally!) but also a very thankful one. Our osso buco style turkey thighs were quite good. We particulary appreciate all the positive messages, good thoughts, prayers, calls, books, flowers, soup, etc. from family and friends. The medical care--doctor, hospital, pharmacist--has been and will continue to be top notch. There will be more procedures and frequent monitoring.
We obtained a copy of the pathology report this morning. All sites tested reported as low-grade carcinoma with no invasion identified. That's as good as it gets considering the amount of tumors he had. Bill is feeling better each day and moving around more. He sees his doctor again on Tuesday. Then in another 3 weeks he will go back into surgery for removal of a temporary stent connecting to one of his kidneys and a check to be sure everything was scraped out the first time. That takes care of Christmas! But for some reason we had not made any special plans!
We have been asked by a number of people what the symptoms were and how the bladder cancer was diagnosed. Bill has had occasional blood and clots in his urine, usually after physical exercise, for a number of years. A previous cystoscopy 5 years ago (camera up into the bladder and farther) showed nothing. His current primary care physician Allison Alcalay was concerned about the continuing symptoms and conferred with a new young urologist who has recently joined her group, Ken Ferguson. He said a new cystoscopy should be done and on Nov. 13 found a large number of tumors. On the 24th he operated. Again, we just got lucky!