It looks like I won't be quite so rushed after all. The hospital made a mistake in its scheduling. I checked with the doctor today, and he definitely intended to wait until the following Tuesday to give me more time off my aspirin regimen. That makes perfect sense to me.
I don't think I mentioned how I actually received my diagnosis. The cystoscopy was going okay. It wasn't painful, really, but strange and unpleasant enough that I couldn't relax my body and was tensed up with clenched fists. Then the doctor says, "Hmm, see that," and his PA replies, "Hmm." Then the doctor asked, "Do you smoke?" It all seemed pretty clear then and there. The chat afterwards was anticlimactic.
As I mentioned before, I had colon cancer eight years ago, so my reaction was not quite the same numb, pole-axed feeling of a first cancer diagnosis. But I am trying to be careful not to assume that I know everything, or that what is true of one form of cancer is necessarily true of another. I will keep in mind the remark attributed (rightly or wrongly) to Mark Twain: "It ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's the things we know that just ain't so."
PST