Now to learn to live with this going forward

So the Treatment is over and my bladder has been scraped, bruised, battered (not like the fish batter), and finally has been in contact with live BCG. And that is after it had Cancer. I'm beginning to feel very sorry for this poor little thing :-)

Anyway, from this point onwards, I now have to work with living with it - Cancer that is. Whatever the outcome of the treatment and that won't be know for 3 + months there are some things that most (if not all) cancers have in common and that is that they can come back. It is quite frequent in bladder cancer to find that a tumour will come back and that it will have to be scraped away again. It also means that I'll be in and out of Hospital a lot for the foreseeable future as they need to check up regularly and I may also end up on a regular maintenance of BCG (if I am lucky) so my next steps are to settle down and get back to "normal" and to live with these things. I'm guessing that everyone will have to do this and the Cancer Research site gives some good pointers about this on their site.

You go through just about all possible emotions and personality types. Some will cope with them differently and it will take different times to do so. It will be interesting now that I will get some more time to reflect on this what I am going to make of it.

A friend of mine told me this was going to be like a Roller Coaster Ride. Once you were strapped in there was NO WAY you could get off the Roller Coaster, you had to go where it took you and there were going to be bits you liked and bits you hated, sudden changes in direction, loop the loops, dark places, water splashes (I put that in here I can't think what that would allude to!) and so on. You could only get off the Roller Coaster when it had stopped and it was safe to do so.

It feels like I have just completed one circuit and the carriages have pulled into the station. I want to get out but I've been told to stay on board. I have to wait and it takes time to fill all the carriages but I know that soon I'll be on my way again. I should be a lot better this time - I know what to expect (or I think I do). I'm more knowledgeable about what is going on and I can learn to tackle the bends and loops easier. I can even begin to enjoy some bits of the ride and occasionally we could get switched to a quieter length of track altogether. I'm on the quiet stretch now, there are no high speed bends, no loop the loops and the dark places are few and far between. I can see the scenery now, everything looks fine and nothing is blurred. I have to stay on the quiet track for another 3 months and then I'll find out which track they want me on next.

I think I'd be very disappointed if this treatment didn't work this time. I need to build myself towards getting that news in a way that keeps me positively focused on sorting this out yet realistic enough to realise that I shouldn't expect this to go away. It will be interesting to see how I can do that in the coming months.