Survivor Story: Gratitude during Bladder Cancer Inspires Hope for Others

Until January 2020, Margo always felt she had an unspoken deal with cancer. She made healthy choices, and it would leave her alone. She never expected that at age 57, she would receive a shocking bladder cancer diagnosis after some blood showed up in her urine.

Margo’s local doctors recommended a certain procedure to properly stage and remove what they thought was one type of bladder cancer. But when she went to MD Anderson for that procedure, their pathologists reviewed the same images and found she actually had two completely different kinds - not only the original high-grade bladder cancer, but also an extremely rare and aggressive plasmacytoid cancer.

This meant Margo wouldn't need that first procedure after all. Instead, her medical team at MD Anderson laid out an aggressive treatment plan - chemotherapy followed by surgery to remove her entire bladder, urethra, uterus, cervix and lymph nodes. During that surgery, they used part of her intestine to create a new way for urine to drain from her kidneys through a small abdominal opening called a stoma into an attached urostomy bag. 

Since all of her treatments were during the quarantine phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, she suffered through them alone. There were so many lonely and painful nights in the hospital for Margo. 

After the surgery, Margo experienced an all-time low of exhaustion and despair. For the first time in her life, she felt like giving up. 

Margo remembered that gratitude had helped pull her through tough times before and searched for anything she could appreciate. She was grateful for the loving relationships she had with her college age kids and husband. Focusing on that helped her find other things to appreciate and she survived and felt incredibly grateful to finally go home and recover with her family around her. 

While having to wear the urostomy bag wasn't something Margo wanted, she was so grateful to come out of it alive and cancer-free as of July 2020. Just four months later, she was able to go on an active hiking and rafting vacation with her family. Any annoyance about the bag was far outweighed by the fact that she was fortunate to be one of those who had beaten cancer. 

Margo wrote and published the book, “Gratitude in the Storm - When Not Dying Is Enough to Keep Fighting”, in July of 2021 with the goal of inspiring hope for anyone facing challenging health journeys. 

Pictured above is Margo with her urologist oncologist, Dr. Ashish Kamat at the Bladder Cancer Advocacy network ThinkTank in 2022. 

To learn more about bladder cancer, check out The Urology Care Foundation resources here.

To listen to more of Margo's story, check out this below podcast: