Question on how tumors grow, etc.

I think your explanation is really well done Sara Anne.
It is sometimes difficult to grasp what the doctors are telling you, particularly when your diagnosis has come as a shock.
John, you will have read that bladder cancer has a nasty habit of recurring, which is why it is essential that once diagnosed, you attend all your scheduled checks - so that IF a recurrence happens, it will be most likely to be in a very early stage (0), and can be removed before it can progress. I like to think of it as a small weed starting to grow in a garden- get it out, spray the weedkiller, but keep checking now and again that no more seedlings have appeared.

John, I think that you are mixing up stage and grade. A "high grade" tumor is one in which the cells are rapidly dividing and this type is especially dangerous since they are much more likely to spread (metastasize) than "low grade" tumors.

"Stage" (0, 3, 4 etc) refers to how much the cancer has already spread. A stage 0, for example, is still completely localized in the original site; stage 4 is one that has metastasized and spread into the lymph nodes and into other sites of the body away from the original site.

Every cancer starts as stage 0....the one localized place where something starts to go haywire. As time goes by, and the cancer grows, it becomes stage 1 and then on. No tumor "starts" as a stage 4. When someone has a newly diagnosed cancer, and it is stage 4, that cancer has been growing undetected for a long time. It did not just suddenly appear....although it may have just been found, it has been there for quite a while.

No one can tell you what the future holds based on the size of your initial tumor. The only thing that might have happened is that there are already other tumors someplace. I am not saying that to scare you....we all have that possibility. This is why the doctors do things like CT scans and many other tests so that that can do their best to detect such possibilities early.

You may be confusing the fact that bladder cancer has the nasty habit of coming back...ie, new tumors showing up in the bladder after some have been removed, with metasteses where the original tumor has already spread.

Right now, all you can say, is that you HAD bladder cancer tumors and that they were removed. GONE. And we will hope that they stay that way...just as they have for most of us.

Sara Anne

John, the "original" stage of the tumor is that determined when the tumor was first found. It may have been there (and probably was) for years, not showing any symptoms. If someone is diagnosed with a stage 4 tumor, this just means that it was not diagnosed earlier when it was going through all the other stages.

Some people have no symptoms at all until a cancer is very advanced, and some have symptoms very early. It depends on the characteristics of the tumor (and not all are exactly the same, even with the "same" diagnosis), it location ..near a blood vessel where it might cause some bleeding for example, and other issues going on with the patient.

Hope this helps?

Sara Anne