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Hi there! I'm mom to a 17 year old dd who was diagnosed with Bladder cancer 17 months ago.... Becca was 16 at the time. She was having unexplained abdominal pains and we couldn't figure out what was causing the pain. Her doctor scheduled her for a sonogram but with a backlog at the hospital, it was going to be a month before she could get in... The doctor told us that if the pains got worse, we should take her to the ER, so we did. We had a quack of an ER doctor who told us that she had the stomach flu even though she wasn't throwing up or had no other symptoms besides the stomach pain. I finally pressed and pressed until he agreed to get a sonogram thinking it might be her ovaries. He told us that he couldn't see anything wrong with her ovaries and sent us home, telling us to follow up with an GYN. Luckily, I was able to get her in with my GYN two days later and got copies of the sonogram sent to her. She sat down with us before examining Becca to look through her notes and after reviewing the sonogram, she asked us who we were dealing with for the tumor in her bladder. What?? What tumor? She said that the sonogram clearly showed a tumor in her bladder. We were shocked. The ER doctor had said nothing. So... she got us an appointment the next day with a urologist, he didn't think it was anything serious but wanted to remove it right away. Two days later she was in the hospital having it removed. The phone rang the next day at work to tell me it was cancer. He was an adult urologist, so he told me that he had already contacted Children's Hospital in Pittsburgh and they wanted to see her immediately because bladder cancer in anyone under 30 is extremely rare, especially a 16 year old girl! Children's operated again the next week to do 8 biopsies in her bladder to make sure it hadn't spread. It hadn't. Thank God!!! Because they felt they had gotten it all, they decided that chemo or BCG weren't needed at this time but that she had to have a scope done every 3 months... It's been 17 months, and she just went in for another scope two weeks ago and all is still clear! Yeah!!! We are praying it stays that way! Bev |
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