Hi,
to quote Monty Python - Always look on the bright side!
You are 54 and you KNOW you have bladder cancer just think if you had bladder cancer and DIDN'T know.
Now you can walk down the street with your head held high and have the certain knowledge that all those people you pass might have cancer and not know it but you KNOW and you are having it fixed! Do you realise that at the moment out of any 5 people you pass in the street 2 will have had or will get cancer.
This is not a disease to be proud, ashamed, indifferent or clandestine about. You very soon get over the natural embarrassment of its location - be it bladder, testicles, vagina, rectum or the tip of your nose - the damned thing has gone wrong and wherever or whatever it is it needs fixing. Hey I'm a 60 year old guy and I've had so many nurses peering up my penis I'm beginning to think they are doing a rerun of Bridget Jones' Diary in my bladder but this time with less clothes on! [then I got bladder cancer! Yeah dream on
].
Would you be ashamed if your leg fell off? Would that make you worried about intimacy in future relationships? If at 54 you have only your physical apearance to impress with I hate to tell you but you are already treading on thin ice!! Time and tide wait for no man and sure to hell gravity ain't kind! Anyway - anyone on the list whose leg fell off Paul McCartney has a vacancy :
This Challenge is just what it says on the tin A Challenge and one that will increase your personality, make you more able and willing to cope with the insecurities of others and give you a whole raft of new friends.
Always look on the bright side of life.
At least when you go to watch Life of Brian or Borat or any other really funny movie, after the op there will be none of the risks inherent for many women over 50!
When is your op? I'm having one tomorrow! Strapped up in gyny stirips with a bunch of masked bandits stealing bits out of my bladder whilst I watch the burning, boiling and cutting on a TV monitor! I'm so well known in the hospital I keep my trousers on in the canteen or people would remember my name fortunately its not the face they study most of the time - except in the canteen! :-/
I hope your op. goes well and in 10 years when the guy you are intimate with keeps sprinting to the toilet because of his prostate you will at least know that what goes around comes around! 8-)
There is nothing to be ashamed of, all that you have is bladder cancer - don't forget life is a sexually transmitted fatal disease, it is what you do with the symptoms in between that count!