Bladder Cancer, Part 1

Since early June, I’ve had blood in my urine. At first it was plainly visible. My PC ordered urine tests. Each time they came back positive for blood. On my last test, July 5, the it was positive for blood, but it wasn’t visible. The PC sent a referral to the Seattle VA Medical Center.

When I went to my appointment in Urology, I was expecting to see an MD. As luck would have it, I saw an ARNP. (My experience with ARNPs in the VA has been less than notable.) The appointment was remarkably short. Basically, the ARNP’s job was to introduce me to cystoscopy. If you don’t know, a cystoscope is a small fiber optic tube that is inserted in the urethra to examine the urinary bladder. It wasn’t surprising the ARNP hadn’t looked at my cystoscopy record as I had those in 2013 and 2019. Those were administered because I had blood in my urine, but they occurred after the bleeding stopped and there wasn’t any blood detected during the exam.

Today, I had my third cystoscopy. Unfortunately, a relatively large tumor and a smaller one were discovered. The urologist administering the exam said the tumors do not look benign. Since she’s in the business of looking for tumors in the bladder, I’ll have to take her word for it.

Bladder cancer is common in older adults. The key to survival is early discovery. Hopefully, my tumors are in their early stages. But that large tumor was too blaring because it was outside the wall of the bladder. If it had grown inward to the muscle wall of the bladder as much as it had grown outward, the chances of a totally happy ending are close to zero.

Next step is a biopsy under anesthesia to definitively discover if the tumors are benign or malignant.