Happy New Year!

I sincerely hope you had a wonderful holiday season and everyone you care about and love made it through safely.

We had a great Christmas and a very low-key New Year’s celebration. So low key we had to remind ourselves that it was New Year’s Day. If it weren’t for the football games it might have passed us unnoticed altogether.

Shut The Front Door

For those of you who have already opened the little door for “long chemo day” on your Paul Hebert Chemo Advent Calendars, sorry to say you can close that door and throw away the calendar.

No – it’s not that I had a miracle cure (I wish – where are those little girls from Fatima when you need them… or at least Benny Hinn.)

As of today – no more chemo.

As of today – time for surgery.

As I’ve probably mentioned more times than you cared to hear I’ve been having additional symptoms since we started the whole chemo process… frequency, urgency, pain. Well, based on those symptoms and what the surgeon saw during my surprise cystoscopy a few weeks ago, they think it would be best to get the surgery sooner than later.

It seems my cancer is as awesome as I am and it is thumbing its proverbial nose at the Cisplatin and Gemzar chemo drugs. So rather than wait for the full course of chemo we’re going in with the surgical option.

Time to say goodbye to “my chair.”

The Surgery

Right now we don’t have a specific date but it will probably be sometime in the next three weeks (fingers crossed.) I’ll let you know the date when we get it scheduled. I’ll also give you my address so you can sent me all those great get well presents (in today’s economy I’m only accepting bars of gold and silver… fyi.)

It looks like they will do the surgery “robotically” which is less invasive and has a reduced recuperation time frame. It is still pretty invasive – the surgery takes about 6 ½ hours. It is like four surgeries in one – removing the bladder, removing part of my intestine and hooking the two ends back up, making a new bladder out of the intestine they took out and then hooking up all the fittings and installing it. That’s a lot of work.

I should be in the hospital for about 4-5 days and then about 4 weeks recuperation period. We’ll see.

So … for now – I won’t be boring you with my nausea and pain stories. Now I can bother you with pics of my scar and all the stuff that goes along with hospital stays. I wonder who my roommate will be?