Astrodome.

The hotel room where I'm staying the night before my surgery overlooks the Astrodome, where I've attended many a baseball game during my life. I once slept in the parking lot to get playoff tickets. I took my daughter there when she was just a few months old--smuggling beer in her diaper bag to avoid paying high prices for warm beer. On a night like this, it's a good view.

Tomorrow's the Day

Tomorrow's the day for my bladder surgery. At best, the beginning of new way of life. I hope everything turns out OK.

Mutilation

So, next week I'm going into to surgery to have my bladder removed. I'll go under anesthesia with a relatively intact body and wake up with pee coming out of a hole in my belly. I think that this is one of the strange things about cancer therapy in general. As a cancer patient, you let doctors do horrible things to you when you are feeling relatively well in complete reliance on the expert's assertion that, if you don't, you will get sick in the future.

Decisions

My doctor did a cystoscope yesterday and decided after looking around inside my bladder and kidney that the best thing to do is to remove the bladder. This presents all sorts of decisions. What happens if I decide to keep my bladder? If I have it removed, do I replace it with a new surgically constructed bladder (which involves wearing a diaper while being toilet-trained again)or an external stoma (which involves walking around with a bag of pee on my stomach for the rest of my life)? What to do about work, housing, caregiving, etc.? Lots of questions floating around. I need to work on the answers.

Going Home

This morning I'm flying to Philadelphia for a brief visit to see my mother, brother, and sister. I'm going this weekend because next week I'm beginning my treatment at MD Anderson and I suspect that I will not be able travel easily for some time in the future, if ever. Because of their disabilities, my mother and brother can not easily travel from Pennsylvania to Texas to visit me, so I'm going to see them. I'm glad to be able to go, but it will be a bittersweet trip for me.