Bruce’s Story

Site created on November 13, 2018

The circle of lives touched by Bruce's extraordinary compassion and service is vast.  As the news of his illness is spreading, we have received a tremendous outpouring of love, prayers and support.  This truly means the world to us.  We are so grateful to all of you and to this site as it will be very helpful in keeping everyone updated.  For those of you who have not yet heard, Bruce was diagnosed with stage 3 bladder cancer a little over 3 months ago.  He completed his 8th and final round of chemotherapy on October 16th and in the weeks since then has been preparing for surgery.  On November 14th,  Bruce will undergo surgery to remove his bladder, colon, prostate and several lymph nodes.  Your continued prayers and well wishes will be greatly appreciated in the next several weeks as he recovers.  Surgery is expected to go into the evening, the post-surgery update may be pretty late or the next morning.  Thank you for following  his journey.

Newest Update

Journal entry by Sheila Froendt

I know it has been a while since the last update... mostly due to being pretty overwhelmed with everything the first few weeks after returning home from the hospital.  We also had some pretty significant challenges and a bit of a setback with his incision not healing.  Everything is going much better this past week.  Bruce is on a wound VAC to help with healing and will continue to be for the next several weeks.  He recently has gotten a lot of strength back and has been up and around a lot more the past few days. He looks great.  We had a birthday celebration last night for our daughter and our granddaughter.  I've attached a photo. 

We had an appointment last week with his cancer doctor and were told that the combination of his chemo treatments followed by surgery should give him about a 75% chance of beating this cancer.  His Oncologist is very active in bladder cancer studies.  He follows all of the national studies very closely and involves his patients in the studies where appropriate.  There are experimental drugs that would increase these odds, but such drugs are now only available to patients participating in studies, which is an option we are considering.  

Going into Christmas week, we are feeling very hopeful that worst is over.  We are focusing on our Blessings more than ever this year.  And feeling so grateful for all of you and his wonderfully hopeful prognosis!  Merry Christmas!!!
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