The Road to Recovery

I want to thank all of my readers who inquired about why they had not seen my weekly blog posts for more than a month. Am I on vacation? Hardly. It is a very long story. In this blog post, I will share the highlights (lowlights) explaining my dropping off the network.  

As of July 9th, I had averaged more than 6,000 steps walked for 435 consecutive days. I felt really good about it as I headed to the local country club to have lunch with a friend. Great. After a nice sandwich and catching up with my friend, I headed home for the afternoon. My first step after getting home was to go to the powder room. To my surprise, I was unable to pee and pain was beginning to rise. After the pain got so bad I couldn’t stand it, it was off to the emergency room at the local hospital. The pain continued to increase and I was in agony. After some procedures, which I will not describe, it was off to the operating room for surgery on the inside of my bladder.

Everyone is familiar with the concept of a bladder. The male bladder is a remarkable organ with essential functions. It is a hollow, muscular sac located in the pelvis, responsible for storing urine produced by the kidneys until it is expelled from the body. Composed of several layers, including a tough outer membrane, a muscular middle layer known as the detrusor muscle, and an inner lining of specialized transitional epithelium, the bladder is both flexible and resilient. This sophisticated system not only helps the body get rid of waste but also contributes to maintaining fluid and electrolyte balance. That is how it is supposed to be, but something 11 year earlier changed the game for me.

In July 2014, I had a robot-assisted radical prostatectomy to remove my cancerous prostate gland. Laboratory analysis of remaining tissue showed there were still more cancer cells. To eradicate those remaining cells, I had 39 days of radiation treatment. I shared the details on this in Robot Attitude: How Robots and Artificial Intelligence Will Make Our Lives Better. The punchline is the radiation tortured the inside of my bladder.

The damage to the inside of the bladder did not become evident for seven years. In 2021, I had a similar incident to the current one. ER to OR and an overnight stay in the hospital. All was well then until after lunch with my friend four years later on July 9 of this year. The experience in 2025 was an order of magnitude more severe than 2021.

The basic problem was radiation cystitis. The blood vessels on the inside of the bladder, which had been tortured by radiation, responded by bleeding. Bleeding over the following month got so severe, my hemoglobin dropped in half, resulting in the need for 13 blood transfusions over the weeks ahead. Hemoglobin is a protein found in red blood cells responsible for carrying oxygen from the lungs to the tissues and organs throughout the body. Without out the right level of hemoglobin, you cannot live. 

During the course of the 42 days I was in the hospital, various treatments were attempted to smooth and protect the inner side of the bladder. None of these was effective. Also during this period, I had constant bladder spasms which are sudden, involuntary contractions of the bladder muscle. The pain was unbearable and it happened multiple times per day. While this was going on, I had four sessions of hyperbaric oxygen treatment. This involved laying in a 2.5 foot diameter 7 foot long “iron lung” for 1 hour and 50 minutes. Under normal conditions this can be a good treatment if you can spare 40 treatments over eight weeks. My situation was not normal.

After a month it was determined the only remaining option for treatment was to remove the bladder. This up to seven hours long is not a small surgery. And not many surgeons are able to do it. The next step was to identify a university academic center and a very special surgeon who could perform the cystectomy.

There are many more details to the story and I may share some of them in subsequent blog posts. The surgery to remove the bladder was performed on August 13th at the Smilow Cancer Surgery Center at Yale New Haven Health in Connecticut. I returned home on August 19th.

My non-clinical summary is I had climbed Mount Everest and gone down the other side. Now, all I had to do was hike across the Sahara Desert. Recovery will be months, not weeks or days. Now that I am home, I will resume my weekly blog posts, and I hope you enjoy them.

Epilogue – Th image of the road to recovery was generated by my Perplexity AI for use in my first blog post in over a month. The article was written by me.