It's Good News Week!!!

The news is about as good as I could realisticly have hoped for. The MRI scan shows the size of the growth has greatly diminished and the tube connecting my right kidney to my bladder is entirely clear. And remember I have had one more session of chemotherapy since that scan was done.

Ann came with me to the Christie today because it was important to us both that she was getting as much information as I did and had a chance to ask questions, too. Dr. W explained my options now were surgery, the removal of the bladder, or radiotherapy to finish the damned thing off followed by regular inspections of my bladder to spot any recurrence as quickly as possible. We had quite a long discussion about percentage recurrences and five-year survival rates but data seemed a bit thin on the ground and some of it wasn’t directly applicable. However he didn’t argue when I said that a good response to chemotherapy which I have undoubtedly had must tip the odds in my favour. If the cancer does recur then surgery becomes the only option, of course, and there is a slight risk that secondries may have had a chance to develop elsewhere in my body. However one would hope that the chemotherapy which impacts on the whole body would have already wiped out any escaped cancer cells.

So I now have a gap before the radiotherapy begins to allow my body to recover completely from the chemotherapy though I have an appointment on September 28th to have a CT scan and a consultation.

I gather that the likely side-effects of radiotherapy are fatigue, painful and more frequent urination (sigh!) and either constipation or the squitters.

We can handle those and they tend to come late in the process and improve slowly during the five or six weeks after the sessions end.

So a few weeks of normal life lies before me with my fatigue from the chemo easing and my general fitness improving. On both Monday and Tuesday I walked to and from the Village, a round trip of about two miles, and actually enjoyed the walk. Yesterday I even had about ten or fifteen minutes on my exercise machine with some good rocking music belting out.

Inshort I feel better than I have for over two years and I am very optimistic about my future.