Update from the hospital bed

Holy cow! Surgery flipping hurts sometimes.  As you can imagine this week has not been the smoothest and I'm pretty sure has been one of the tougher ones in my existence.  I've been saying it all along but support from family and friends is huge in these situations and all day and night I have had someone by my side to help aide me through this and I just have to say a big thank you to all who have gotten to visit or send your well wishes.  My attendees here have kept me posted throughout the week with your messages.  Today I am feeling much better than just a couple days ago and able to walk normally (still no ab workouts though).  I have found that surgery is a bit different than chemo in the sense that after surgery is set in motion, there is not a choice to cry uncle and take a break.  I also wanted to reiterate how big of a success this surgery was.  The goal of the surgery was to pull out all the cancerous tissue and sew me back up to heal with no cancer left in the body.  At the end of at least an 8 hour surgery, my stellar team here at UWMC managed to remove my bladder, prostate, and 24 lymph nodes.  They then took a 60 cm section of my small intestine and created me a neobladder (I was lucky enough to have this option as there was no cancer in the urethra, they tested it during surgery).  It took until late Friday evening for them to finish up the pathology report from all the removed tissue and Dr Wright came in on Saturday morning to give me the news.  They found no cancer in the bladder or prostate, no cancer in the lymph nodes highest in my chest (highest risk), and only microscopic living cancer in one of the smaller nodes next to the bladder that was surrounded by dead cancer.  It was great to hear that the chemo had been so successful and that we managed to pull out everything that was affected.  Tears of joy my friends! 

I'm now waiting on my bowels to decide to play nice with each other once again.  The last few days have been full of a forward/backward movement that I must say is not fun.  The scar is not quite as long as I was originally thinking but it is still 6-8 inches long, mostly below the belly button.  If I can manage to keep some solid food down for a day I will be on my way out of here and likely recovering at my parents house for a couple weeks.  Not sure how long the rest of recovery will be but I think I'll be taking it slow and the hard parts should be behind me. I may post more details of the past week later but it may not be the most pleasurable read.

Ferlan and friends, see you in June for the sprint triathlon :)