My Bladder Cancer Fight

When urinary tract cancer spreads, the original tumor sheds cancer cells that travel through the bloodstream and lymph system to other parts of the body. Secondary sites, new tumors, begin to grow. The distance that the cancer spreads from the original Primary site depends on many factors.

• Have you been diagnosed and are you receiving treatment.

• Depends on the type of cancer cell

• Depends on the location of the Primary site.

• If you are on treatment, your bodies responses to that treatment.

Urinary cancer commonly spread to:

• The lungs

• The bones

• The Lymph Nodes

• The Liver

• And possibly the brain

What is metastasis, and how does it happen?

Metastasis means the spread of cancer. Cancer cells can break away from a primary tumor and enter the bloodstream or lymphatic system (the system that produces, stores, and carries the cells that fight infections). That is how cancer cells spread to other parts of the body.

When cancer cells spread and form a new tumor in a different organ, the new tumor is a metastatic tumor. The cells in the metastatic tumor come from the original tumor. This means, for example, that if breast cancer spreads to the lungs, the metastatic tumor in the lung is made up of cancerous breast cells (not lung cells). In this case, the disease in the lungs is metastatic breast cancer (not lung cancer). Under a microscope, metastatic breast cancer cells generally look the same as the cancer cells in the breast.

Quote source

 

Patients with metastatic bladder cancer, receiving the most effective chemotherapy, usually do not have a high survival rate.

Metastatic cancer in all its different forms is a deadly foe.

Metastatic cancer means that the cancer from the primary site has traveled to other parts of the body by the blood stream or the Lymphatic system and set up a secondary site containing the same biological make up as the primary site.

Generally in bladder cancer, but not always, there are definite signs that something is very wrong with your Urinary system. The most common symptom is gross blood in the urine.

• Only 5% of people on diagnosis of bladder cancer have metastases. Source

• 75% of bladder cancers are diagnosed while the cancer is still only in the bladder lining. Source

In my case, after radical Cystectomy was performed in 2001, it was found that my cancer had Metastasized to the lymph nodes in the groin. Luckily for me, the Pathologist, on thorough examination of the lymph nodes, only found a few cancer cells identical to the cancer cells found in the bladder wall. So the metastasization was fairly recent. A massive chemotherapy program was administered immediately and appears to have done its job as I am cancer free 8 years later.
80 to 90% of patients can look forward to five or more healthy years if there is early detection and treatment before the cancer has invaded the bladder wall. As far as cancer treatment is concerned, surviving five years or more after treatment, the patient is considered cured.

A person ignoring any symptom that “something is wrong with my Urinary system”, and it is cancer, is signing their own death certificate.

The cancer will invade the bladder wall, will breach the bladder wall and will metastasize in some other organ. You will die.

Believe me when I say, if bladder cancer is not treated by the traditional Medical Community aggressively, you will die.

Yes, I am trying to scare the hell out of you!

“I will do something about it tomorrow”, is not even in this ball game, there may be “NO tomorrow”.

Posted on May 5th, 2008 by Neil
Filed under: Bladder Cancer - Background, My Cancer