Bill began smoking cigars when he was in his mid-30’s. By the time he retired he had bladder cancer.
 
Like the vast majority of the population Bill had never known that many thousands of people die in the UK each year as a direct result of smoking.
 
Said Bill,72: “Cancer is frightening to everybody, and I was frightened when I began passing blood and I knew instinctively that something was seriously wrong. But I have been determined to beat this. Years ago we didn’t know as much then as we do now about the dangers of smoking, but even now there is very little publicity about the direct connection between smoking and bladder cancer.
 


“I’m an upbeat and upfront person and I think I’ve had an incredible improvement in my quality of life since my bladder was removed. I would say to anyone who smokes; “Give it up” because no one wants to spend the rest of their days having to live with urine continually passing into a bag, morning noon and night!”
 
Bill knew that something was going wrong when he began to pass blood in his urine. Initially he had chemotherapy to shrink the tumour, followed by radiotherapy. Aside effect of this was that his bladder shrank too and eventually only had a 30ml capacity as it had become, as Bill puts it: “encased in a concrete crust.”
 
He said: “When the operation to completely remove my bladder was suggested I didn’t hesitate. The difference in my quality of life now is incredible. If someone is facing a diagnosis of bladder cancer I would recommend going for a uroscopy, the camera in the bladder. A urostomy,. That’s the name for the type of stoma that is made on your abdominal wall so that urine can continually pass through into a collection bag. There are different bags for day and night use and in the daytime I have to empty the bag every couple of hours. But I haven’t found this has restricted me in what I can do, and it’s not too much of an inconvenience. “
 
Bill leads a normal life now, driving, walking the dogs, flying on holiday and having the very occasional glass of wine or drink of beer.
 
He said: “That may sound fine, but the reality is that I wish I had known about the connection between bladder cancer and smoking. No one would take the risk of either an early death or loosing their bladder if they really understood how devasting it is to receive that diagnosis.”