One of the downsides of getting old is getting sick. I never had any serious illnesses when younger and working. After I retired things changed. Like an old car my bits started to wear out and seize up.
We had moved into a retirement community when my wife retired, but I kept working. The community we moved to is like a vacation resort for geezers with lots of activities to pursue. After about a year commuting to work and back every day while missing out on all the fun to be had at home during the day, I decided to hang up my slide rule and retire.
In retirement I played golf as many as four times a week and renewed my long-lost interest in building and flying radio-controlled aircraft, drones, and sailboats. I also took up painting, mostly wild and colorful abstract cubist paintings in acrylic, and some oil on canvas of more demure subjects. I was taking full advantage of the activities that our community offered when I was diagnosed with bladder cancer.
I won’t go into the details here of how I found out I had bladder cancer, and the story of my treatment and complications. If you are interested in the gory details, you can find them in this attached story. Suffice it to say that I had a long journey with the disease, finally having my bladder and prostate removed to be replaced by a stoma and the exterior plastic urine bag that I wear today. It’s not a great solution but it’s tolerable and allows me to wake up each morning on the green side of the grass. A negative consequence of the surgery was the loss of function of my wedding tackle, but at my age that too is tolerable.
In the midst of this journey, I had a negative finding from a colonoscopy. They found something suspicious near the junction of my transverse colon and descending colon. After checking that this condition, unlike a fine wine, would not improve with age, I agreed to having partial colorectal surgery. The surgery was performed using a DaVinci robotic surgery machine. As a confirmed technophile I insisted in being introduced to this apparatus in the operating theatre before they turned my lights out. I awoke missing a few inches of my colon and with four ‘stab’ wounds in my lower abdomen, but no stoma and no bag – whoopee!
I don’t know what caused me to have the issue with my colon, but I do know what caused the bladder cancer, smoking cigarettes which I did for fifty years. Smoking causes about 90% of bladder cancers – who knew? My advice, beyond stopping, is that if you have incidence of dark pee, get tested. Bladder cancer is eminently treatable if caught early. If the cancer grows through the bladder wall into the muscle, then it becomes much more serious. To avoid colon cancer, get your regularly scheduled colonoscopies. Again, when caught early it is successfully treatable. Yes, I know the reluctance to go through the pre-colonoscopy purge process, but it’s better than a big stoma and colostomy bag, always assuming you survive that far.
So, in conclusion, the older you get, the more you need to take care of yourself. Stay fit and active and pay particular attention to your health and any symptoms of your stuff going wrong or breaking. Try to stay on the green side of the grass and have fun doing so.
