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How Bladder Cancer Can Be Treated Part 2/2
Jim presented with a very high grade aggressive bladder cancer. This was a large tumor that was invading the inner lining of the wall of his bladder. We know that young patients who have high grade tumors such as this are at risk for disease progression where a lot of it has been spread to other parts of his body.
Well, symptoms of bladder cancer most commonly are blood in the urine. If there is blood in the urine and you see the blood in your urine, bladder cancer must be entertained and must be ruled out. When bladder cancer is detected early survival rates are in the 80 to 90% range. When bladder cancer is detected, when it is more advanced survival rate despite surgery and chemotherapy dropped into the 30 at best 50% range.
Radical cystectomy or removal of the bladder for bladder cancer is a major urologic procedure. It requires a surgical incision. It requires the dissection of lymph nodes along some major blood vessels in pelvis and the abdomen and then we remove the bladder and prostate. The small intestine as well as the large intestine is a tube that we need to take of a portion of this intestine. Maintain it on its natural blood supply and then reconnect the remaining intestine so that the bladder function is restored and recovered.
Once we have this vesicular tube of intestine we typically open this tube up and make it into a plate. We can shape this into a bladder, fold it in such a way so the kidney tubes or the ureters into this new bladder and then put it where the old bladder was. This was the procedure we performed in Jim.
I think that it was three to four months pretty much most patients, Jim included, are feeling back to normal. They do require a little bit more time after that to completely feel back to normal but typically about 10 to 12 weeks after surgery the urinary control is recovering nicely during the day time, probably another month for it to recover completely over the evening.
They begin enjoying life. They are back at work. They’re feeling well. Their sexual function is still recovering. Their overall energy and strength is recovering. Their emotional well-being is pretty much recovered. It helps when you have support of family and friends and certainly Jim has benefited from all that.
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