It’s been a while since I wrote. I wish I could say that life has been extra busy, but that’s not even the half of it. (I started writing this in early September, added a little more in November, but am just now getting it publish-ready. Sorry!)
Content Warning: This article discusses major surgery and bodily functions. It may not be appropriate for people with sensitive stomachs.
The month of September started with me going into the emergency room with bladder issues. I ended up being catheterized, and I learned that I had stage 2 bladder cancer. Surgery would remove a squamous cell cancerous growth in my bladder. While the surgeon got all of the cancer, the cancer was a very aggressive cancer. An even more aggressive surgery was on the horizon to try to make certain it was completely removed.
Major surgery
The surgery was on the day that the LA Dodgers and the Toronto Blue Jays played game 1 of the 2025 World Series. My cancer surgeon removed my bladder, along with my prostate and some of my lymph nodes. The procedure, called a urinary diversion, lasted over four hours. I had three options for my surgery: an ileal conduit, a neobladder, and a catheterizable pouch. The pouch wasn’t a good option for me, so that left two options for me.
My surgeon didn’t have a preference between the remaining options, but the neobladder would have required frequent catheterization. I didn’t mind having a catheter in my bladder between my 1 September ER visit and my first surgery. A neobladder would have meant a fresh catheterization several times a day. Thank you, no.
The ileal conduit uses a section of bowel to create a tube from the kidneys to a port on the belly called a stoma and into a wearable pouch called an ostomy bag. The bag has to be emptied several times a day, but I got used to emptying a leg bag when I was catheterized. That meant emptying my ostomy bag is no big deal. When I go to bed, I connect a bed bag as I did with the catheter. In the morning, I empty it and rinse the bag with a vinegar-water solution.
The joys of the ostomy bag
The biggest hassle is changing the ostomy bag twice a week, which is glued directly to my stomach around the stoma. Before I can apply the new bag, I have to clean the stoma. There are multiple steps to changing the bag, but the longer I do it, the easier it will become. My visiting nurse says I’ll be able to do it with my eyes closed. Unfortunately, I’ll have to check to see if the size of the stoma has changed. It changes as my body changes, so I may need to trim the opening of the ostomy bag to fit the stoma.
Several parts need to be collected, trimmed, and connected as I change the ostomy bag. Since nobody’s body is the same, there’s no way to combine everything into a single unit. There is a company that combines three of the four parts, but so far, I prefer assembling the parts myself. I tried the combined parts, but I had too many problems with leakage.
That’s not the biggest problem
My doctor wouldn’t let me go home until I could move my bowels. I got so much gas that I screamed into a pillow or a towel because it can hurt so much. To add insult to injury, my bowels didn’t move like they used to. My bowels could go from not doing anything to expelling juicy waste in unending dribs and drabs. I have to spend a good bit of time cleaning up, and the fluid that came out was very acidic and irritated my bum pretty badly. Thank the Goddess for Depends because I would have had to throw away multiple pairs of underwear every week.
Food, glorious food
My doctor had told me to think of eating 5 or 6 smaller meals rather than 3 regular meals, and I tried to do that for a while. I’m more of a grazer than a 3-meals-a-day girl, so it’s easier to make the change. I’m also trying to get my big meal closer to lunch time to make it easier to empty my bowels earlier in the day, but that’s still a work in progress. With the calendar reading December, I’m pretty much back to eating what passes for normality for me. It’s good to be eating normal food again, but I still have to do some tweaking to my eating habits.
I found a great cookbook to help me make better food and try to get back on the Mediterranean Diet. I had been using Emily Cooper’s Mediterranean Diet on a Budget, but between the expense of the ingredients and the amount of food the recipes made, I took myself off the diet last year.
I’ve long been a fan of Kelly Jagger’s Cooking For One cookbook series, and she has added The Ultimate Mediterranean Diet Cooking For One Cookbook to the series. It has recipes that will feed one person rather than a small army like Cooper’s recipes do. The only thing I have to do is to get some smaller cooking and baking pieces. Now all I need to do is go through the cookbook some more and choose what recipes I want to try. Then I’ll have to get the ingredients so I can start making them.
Momma kept needing a nap
Once I got home from the hospital, I was getting naps in during either the afternoon or evening, if not both. I’ve always been a “Once I’m up, I’m up,” kind of person, but I’m learning to embrace the nap. It helps that when I lie down for a nap, my furry son Chuck comes and lies down with me. He’s been a wonderful furry nurse since I came home from the hospital. He even learned that it’s not good to get on mum’s belly because it hurts her so much.
I don’t nap as often as I did after the surgery, but there are still evenings when I move to the bedroom. I may not nap, but I’ll chill for a few hours. There’s just one problem: Things don’t get done when I move to the bedroom, like finally getting this article written or working on my music.
How’s the music going?
I wish I could say I’ve been working on it, but I haven’t picked up my guitar once since the surgery. My DAW software hasn’t been opened in a while, because my attention span doesn’t last quite enough to work on my song. I hate that, but with luck, things will change as I recover more from the surgery.
I still have a lot of work to do on my song, plus I have other music in my head as always. Once I’m able to get back to an abbi normal schedule, making music will go back on the daily gotta-do list.
The dreaded premature computer OS upgrade
I’d been waiting to upgrade the operating system on my laptop, but I ended up doing it prematurely and had so many issues that I did another install, this time rolling back to the previous version of the operating system. Except that it messed up my audio subsystem so much that my music production software wouldn’t work properly.
I had looked at installing AV Linux MX Edition when I was given a new computer last year, but I hadn’t gotten a chance to install it when the person who bought me the computer had to claw it back. (I won’t get into why.) I’m looking at the OS again, and if I weren’t having issues with Bluetooth, I would have installed it already. The OS comes with most of the music production software I want to use pre-installed.
Just before moving this from draft to the website, I was able to resolve the Bluetooth issues. Once I publish this, I’ll install AV Linux this evening. Once it’s installed, I’ll write up my thoughts on it, including how I connected my Bluetooth keyboard.
The holidays are already here again?
Yep, it’s that time of year again. I did even less for Turkey Day than I did last year, because I wasn’t up for making, eating, and storing that much food in just three weeks after my hospitalization. The government shutdown has screwed up a lot of people’s food budgets, including mine, but my state turned SNAP benefits on just in time for when I usually get mine, so I didn’t have to panic about making groceries.
This year, I decided against putting up any decorations for Catmas. Putting them up would take a lot of time and effort for just me and Chuck, and Chuck mostly likes the tree for climbing. I spent too many mornings last Catmas standing the Catmas bush back up and putting decorations back on it, so I’m taking a pass on it this year.
I’m still playing my Catmas music, and I’ve already pulled out my binder of charts for Catmas songs I want to work on. There are a lot of Trans-Siberian Orchestra songs that I printed from Songsterr in it, and I also have two guitar tracks for Slade’s Merry Xmas Everybody. Let’s face it, as a Doctor Who fan who plays the electric guitar, it’s almost required that I learn that song. Goddess knows it’s been in the show enough times. (My favorite time is Last Christmas from series 9.)
Have a Purrrrrry Catmas!
This may be my last article here for the year. I have an update that’s owed on my Second Life site as well, and I haven’t even started writing it yet. I hope everyone can have the purriest of Catmases and a scratch-free New Year, whether you celebrate my version of the holiday or not. Be kind, and don’t let the assholes and haters harsh your mellow, even if the assholes are family members.