Four weeks is not too long. IF you have cancer, it has been there for quite a while and it doesn't grow rapidly enough that four weeks would matter. Four months would be too long!
Yes, you are having cystoscopy in the office. The urologist will insert a small camera into the bladder and look around. For women this procedure is usually "no big deal" sort of like a pelvic exam. For males with different anatomy it can be more unpleasant. IF it appears to the urologist that cancer might be present he will do basically the same procedure while you are under general anesthesia so that he can snip out obvious tumors and take biopsy samples for pathology analysis. This is an outpatient procedure and usually you just get up and go home after you wake up.
The probability is that if this is bladder cancer it will have been caught early and is very treatable. The treatment protocols would depend on what the path report states. If it is low grade (slow-growing) the usual thing is just for you to have cystoscopy exams every three months for a while and then less frequently as time goes on. If it is high grade (rapidly dividing) there are several options available. For example, mine was high grade so I had a form of immunotherapy (BCG) and have now been cancer-free for over 13 years! But until you have path results you won't know what will come next.
I am sorry that your husband is not there for you to lean on. Perhaps he could go with you to your next urology appointment and speak with the urologist? He needs to know that this is NOT the end of the world and that the odds say that you will be fine. But you do need to have someone to dump on.
Sara Anne
Diagnosis 2-08 Small papillary TCC; CIS
BCG; BCG maintenance
Vice-President, American Bladder Cancer Society
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