July 2019
It was a three-hour flight, and I’ve seen him pass down the aisle at least three times. Did he really drink that much coffee? I wondered how often my husband could get up to the bathroom on our flight from Salt Lake City to Atlanta. It was 2019, and we had flown out to bring our grandchildren home to their mom.
“I’m bleeding,” Bob said softly to me as soon as we got off the plane so the grandchildren couldn’t hear. “Urine.” My heart stopped. Was his prostate cancer back? He’s been cancer-free for ten years. What else could it be?
My husband looks like the healthiest person in the world. He works out at the gym daily and is like the Energizer Bunny. He never stops moving. He would still be flying if it weren’t for his defibrillator, but since he retired, he has taken care of the house and even grocery shopping. He’s in a perpetual good mood, and nothing gets him down.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We’ll call the urologist on Monday.”
He was quiet on the drive from the airport home. I wondered what he was thinking and how he was feeling, but I knew not to say anything so the grandchildren wouldn’t be upset. Monday morning couldn’t come too soon.
Bob called the urologist on Monday morning. We waited for a return phone call. He called again on Tuesday and left a message. Finally, on Thursday, the nurse called back.
“We’re scheduling you for surgery,” the nurse told him. “We’ll call you when it’s scheduled.”
While I wasn’t completely comfortable with the doctor scheduling surgery without seeing my husband, I knew that a cystoscopy was necessary to see what was going on. But didn’t he need to do any preop paperwork? Didn’t he need a preop exam? At least a phone call would have been helpful.
Two weeks later, I sat at my husband’s bedside while he was awaiting surgery. The urologist came in and explained what he was going to do. He was going to send up an instrument into the bladder to look around. We signed the operative permits, and I moved to the waiting room.
Several hours later, the doctor came in and sat down beside me.
“Your husband has bladder cancer,” the doctor said as he drew a picture to show me the location. This doctor is known for drawing pictures, and he drew a picture of a penis and urethra leading up to the bladder.
“My grandfather died from bladder cancer,” I told him.
“Yeah, but back then they probably did it with a candle,” he laughed. I wasn’t feeling humorous and I remember not appreciating his attempts at humor. I remembered how hard the diagnosis was on my grandparents.
“There are two kinds, high grade, and low grade, and we won’t know until the pathology comes back which kind it is. In the meantime, do not get on the internet and scare yourself. We’ll call you with the results and reschedule a follow-up cystoscopy to see what’s going on.”
The doctor’s son was a friend of our youngest grandson, and he knew both of us from the private school they attended. He knew me, knew that I am a nurse, and that I’d be on Google as soon as he left.
I couldn’t shake the vision of my grandfather standing in front of the sink in the powder room of my home, struggling to manage his ileostomy. This couldn’t be happening. My grandparents stopped traveling soon after.
Waiting was so hard.
The pathology report was terrifying. High-grade urothelial cell carcinoma. “The treatment of choice is BCG infusions into the bladder each week for six weeks, but we can’t get BCG, so we’ll see you in a year.”
The doctor was going to do nothing when there was a treatment for bladder cancer? Were we supposed to accept this? Images of my grandfather kept coming back.
Doing nothing was totally unacceptable. My husband could die.
Dr. Suzanne Minarcine 