Facing Cancer and Realizing There May Never Quite Be a Full Cure
We need to get a handle on the toxins in our environment and promote healthfulness better.
Some years ago a little ditty/phrase began running through my head, “What’s the Matter, It’s My Bladder.” I don’t know where it came from except that it was a clever (almost) rhyme.
I was not having any urinary problems (at the time), and as far as I knew I was in quite good health. (For most of my life I’ve taken pretty good care of myself, been a tennis player, runner, and pretty much a health purist — non-drinker, non-smoker, non-drug taker.)
Not that my life hasn’t had its stresses — a divorce, the suicide of a dear loved one (who, by the way, had a serious incontinence problem caused by the disease Spina Bifida), bouts with unemployment, and a colossal failure to build a house on five acres of land in the Pacific Northwest (though not at all my fault) which preceded the suicide.
Yet I consider myself a Lucky Man in general, and have now been married to a good woman for nearly 25 years with whom I’ve run several profitable businesses — and we’ve become upstanding citizens in a small community in a desirable location on the California coast. I have 12 grandchildren and family members in abundance (except my parents who died in their mid-80's). Vocationally, I ran the Greener Pastures Institute for 15 years and received gobs of nationwide publicity prior to meeting my sweet and hard-working wife Eleanor. And I can say that I’ve helped thousands find their small town “Shangri-las.”
The above “ditty,” however, could be considered some kind of premonition, or even prediction, because about the time covid-19 impacted the world, I was diagnosed with a virulent case of Bladder Cancer.
Affecting only about one in 100 men (and far fewer women), I wrote the headline “Rare, Unfair and a Big Scare: My Battle with Bladder Cancer,” for a PBS site, nextavenue.org, about a year ago. Next Avenue is for seniors and no one had ever written on the subject before at the site despite the online journal’s existence for many years.
Bladder cancer is something of a Medical Mystery. Smoking is certainly causative as is exposure to industrial chemicals. I never smoked. I painted quite a few apartments when I ran a business for landlords, but the paint wasn’t the toxic, oil-based kind with fumes, but latex. I grew up in smoggy Los Angeles (smog is caused mostly by car exhaust), but I left as a young man for Oregon and started running on the famous Hayward Field track there in the fresh air — I once did a 5:10 mile. (Lived in Iowa two years while going to college.) Had my lungs been damaged I would not have had the ability to run the above race, and once a 17 minute 5000 meters — without coaching and as a complete amateur.
One possible causative of the bladder cancer I eventually got: both the quality and quantity of my drinking water.
Most Americans take their drinking water pretty much for granted. I certainly did. Consumer’s Union recently published a piece that condemns many municipal water sources for the number of toxins in them — phthalates, chlorine, lead, and arsenic. Arsenic, very recently, has been implicated in bladder cancer cases. None of these chemicals should be ingested yet we are lab rats if we do not seek out a purer source of this life-maintaining liquid. (Yet bottled water has its critics as well.)
As to quantity — and I might add preemptively that drinking more of the bad stuff doesn’t quite make sense — health authorities say most of us don’t drink enough water to stay sufficiently hydrated and for adequate digestion of our food. I admit to not drinking enough but how many fail to get the recommended six-eight ounces of fluids daily? That’s a lot of water and quite a few trips a day to pee it out in the “john.”
But the bladder is sensitive to a lack of fluids and the build-up of toxins that somehow escape the cleansing kidneys via the ureters. At least that’s what I have found out — much too late. And everything liquid that isn’t excreted through sweat must pass through the little pear-shaped organ that is the bladder, out of sight and out of mind for most of us.
So somewhere along the line the uterine liner of my bladder became infected with cancer cells. Since I wasn’t looking for any signs of it, I ignored some small red spots that were being excreted with my urine until I admitted seeing them to my wife and we had several tests/scans, etc. Then we went to a local urologist — who confirmed the diagnosis of cancer after a biopsy.
I had gotten cancer at the exact average age of most men who do — 73.
Nobody but nobody wants to hear that they have cancer. It certainly can be a death sentence without some form of treatment because cancer cells love to replicate in oxygen-free tissues (hiding out, in effect). I was told that I needed what’s called a TURBT, a surgical operation where under anesthesia the cancer cells — hopefully, which haven’t escaped the bladder wall (a worst-case scenario) are removed with precision. While all this was going on I admit I was somewhat in denial, especially since my daily activities hadn’t been affected in the slightest. I was still playing tennis, hiking, and biking, etc. And sex wasn’t affected — except that when you fear for your life it might not be of the highest standard…
Your world changes when suddenly, and drastically, you become a “sick person.”
You start getting a lot of sympathetic or empathetic responses but since bladder cancer is so rare few can (or really want to) understand it. In my community, I “met” (via the internet) only one person who had had it, and he’d lost his bladder when the cancer wasn’t removed soon enough — he is now wearing what they call a colostomy bag — an artificial bladder outside the abdomen. No one wants that. (But at least removal stops the cancer and you aren’t going to die — unless the cancer has spread to lymph nodes, etc.).
Now there’s another ditty/expression I think about often and that is “life isn’t fair.” I’ve known (and “own” that) and my response has always been to accept it. But it really isn’t fair when you have a disease that you don’t feel you had anything to do with causing, and suddenly you become possibly a “permanent patient.” You start seeing your life as a series of events on a “medical merry-go-round” that never stops. And with the cancer I got, and as I write this, I have a sinking feeling that that’s my fate — despite two surgeries and chemo treatments that supposedly came to completion and fruition.
Because the latest is that the cancer which surgeons told me they “removed completely” might be back via a “mass” they haven’t quite identified as of yet. Complete removal is probably a fantasy, anyway, when it comes to cancerous tissue once it gets entrenched.
Then again, maybe I am just being paranoid. What I have been reading in the “holistic health” literature lately (and there are lots) is that you can’t “kill” cancer with treatments that CAUSE cancer (chemo), only deter it. Sooner or later you need to build up your natural immune system — which when healthy won’t let cancer propagate — via the infusion of healthy foods, vitamins, and herbs along with methods to “detoxify” your body which likely contains remnants of the chemo treatments and has been weakened by them. (I read that the first chemo was derived from mustard gas, used in World War I to cripple enemy soldiers. Great.)
As I write I do feel like I am in completely good health, I even write a column in my local daily paper, “Active Over 50.” That’s me! I can’t imagine NOT being active, yet possibly still having cancer gives one serious pause. I want it gone now and never return because it doesn’t “deserve” to be in me…I did just about everything the doctors told me to do but the problem is they won’t accept that I am quite well and keep “drilling” for more signs of infirmity.
Just going to the urologist at this point seems almost pointless as I am not having another operation, ever. The first one was very traumatic and the anesthesia was overly applied. resulting in days of grogginess and lack of good balance. (The second had none of that a day later. It was performed at the world-famous Stanford Medical Center in Palo Alto by a skilled surgeon who specializes in bladder cancer cases.)
I’m saying that it should be up to me to continue to defend against any future cancer by living not only right but heroically, day to day. I thought I was doing this before the cancer, it’s something people should just do. Chin into the wind. As fearless as possible. I may only have ten or a few more years to live anyway (my folks’ longevity is an indication, by their 80’s they suffered from various ills).
At 74 I feel like I can do almost anything (except forget I have had this cancer). My mind is as sharp as ever, my tennis game nearly so (I won a tournament only a few years ago), my wife and I travel the world (or we did, before covid), I write articles regularly published (in mostly seniors publications) and we see friends and family quite regularly. It’s not only a good life, it’s a GREAT life. Maybe to even to bring this cancer issue up at this point makes me a bit of a crybaby.
But I feel compelled to tell my story, which I also have at bcan.org, a bladder cancer advocacy group in Maryland. Bladder cancer SHOULD NOT be a death sentence until, alas, it is. (I still maintain I am in remission).
We need to get a handle on the toxins in our environment and promote healthfulness better — especially the eating of myriad fruits and vegetables, avoiding refined sugars, hydration with pure water, avoiding most drugs, stopping the epidemic of smoking, and getting plenty of exercise at every stage of life. If you’re upright you should be able to do those things.
I still am quite upright (and outspoken!) so I hope you have gotten something out of this missive — especially if you have cancer or fear getting it. Wish me luck but recognize that I have already had plenty of it.
And tomorrow’s always another day.
