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.