How long is normal wait for surgery?

Hi Pat,

Thanks for your post. I too thought it was odd that he only does surgery once a week. He's in a practice with only one other doctor too. We're in the Lehigh Valley (Allentown-Bethlehem) area of Pennsylvania. Not the sticks, but certainly not Philly or NYC, mind you, when it comes to services. I was checking out Sloan-Kettering Memorial online today. They have a whole team of drs. specializing in bladder cancer, and it would seem that she could go there. But she doesn't want to travel or inconvenience anyone and she's very stubborn.

She did have an MRI and bone scan. As far as they could tell, it hasn't spread. But they were going to check the lymph nodes in the groin yesterday, had the surgery not been cancelled. She was told that the external bag was her only option.

WG

Well this is a tough one...its obviously an aggressive tumor and needs to be removed.......but my hesitancy is with a urologist who only perfoms surgery one day a week. You want a surgeon who sees patients one day a week and does surgery the rest of the week......a very experienced surgeon in this arena and that will mean a major cancer center or nearby university affiliated hospital. Where are you located? You definately need another opinion and probably surgeon. Because of her age they probably will only want to do an ileal conduit (an outside bag) . Its a shorter surgery and less invasive and a quicker recovery time.
Has she had a bone scan, chest x-ray or any other tests?
Pat

Hi All,

I'm new here, and I'm hoping you can give me advice and/or info.

My grandmother had a cat scan back in April that showed a mass on sitting on her bladder. After seeing a gynecological oncologist and determining that it was not related to her uterus or ovaries, she was scheduled to see a urologist. But on Memorial Day weekend, a few days before her appointment, the tumor broke through the wall of her bladder and she began hemorraghing. She was diagnosed at the hospital with Stage 2 Squamus cell invasive bladder cancer (I don't know any more specifics about her diagnosis).

She was told she's have to have her bladder removed, and surgery was scheduled for 8/1 b/c the doctor only does surgery on Wednesdays, and that was the earliest he could schedule her.

Yesterday, 8/1, her surgery was cancelled due to a snafu, we think, by the doctor's office. They claimed they sent her an instruction sheet saying her bowel had to be completely emptied (like for a colonoscopy). But we never got the sheet. So it was cancelled.

Now we're told she might not be able to have the surgery for another 3 or 4 weeks (not least because the doctor goes on vacation the week after next). In the meantime, my 82 year old grandmother is down to 81 pounds. (She has very little appetite, and it's all we can do to get her to eat something, though she's getting better at accepting that she'll have to eat even if she's not hungry.) We're of course worried that by the time she can have surgery again, she may weigh even less and be weaker!

I have a few questions:

-Is it normal to have to wait so long for surgery?
-What is the best way to get the surgery scheduled for earlier? We thought about having her family physician call the surgeon.
-Is there any advice you can give us?

I'd like to take her to a larger hospital or cancer center, but it doesn't seem like that's going to be possible.

Thanks for your help!