Hollings Horizons Winter 2025 - Flipbook - Page 19
BLA DDER
CANCER IS
4X
MORE
COMMON
IN MEN
THAN
WOMEN
RUTH SYKORA
LARISSA SHANNON
BLADDER CANCER
BREAST CANCER
Bladder cancer is about four times as common
among men as women. That doesn’t mean that
women don’t get bladder cancer, though.
Diagnosed at age 32 with breast cancer, Larissa
Shannon knew that she needed to stay active and
busy for her mental health.
Unfortunately, as Ruth Sykora discovered, it can
take longer for a woman to be diagnosed, likely
because the symptoms are similar to more common
problems like urinary tract infections.
A high school P.E. and business teacher, she
continued teaching and coaching softball and
worked out as much as her body would allow,
even if only for a 30-minute session.
“That's a common story for it to take the better
part of a year for diagnosis,” she said.
“Mentally, it was not going to be good for me to
sit there and wallow in, ‘Oh, I’ve got cancer,’” she
said. “Because it does suck. It's terrible. But I think
moving my body helped so much.”
Now, after life-changing surgery at Hollings,
Sykora feels that she was lucky. Although
it took a while to get a diagnosis, once
diagnosed, she was quickly treated and is
now cancer-free.
Symptoms of bladder cancer tend to be
subtle — until they’re not. Blood in the
urine is the most common early sign,
although Sykora never experienced
that. Instead, she had pain that felt like a
urinary tract infection, or UTI.
After extensive surgery and an immunotherapy regimen, that pain is gone.
“I didn't sleep for a year. I was awake every
hour in pain for the last six months,” she described
of her time before surgery. “And now I have no pain.
And I sleep.”
Even better, throughout her journey, she felt the
love of family, friends and her yoga community, who
rallied to provide emotional and practical support.
“I’ve had a lot of angels on the way,” she said. “I have
never been so surrounded with love in my life.”
hollingscancercenter.musc.edu
Research backs her up. The American
College of Sports Medicine reports that
aerobic exercise can help to improve
anxiety, depression, fatigue, quality of
life and physical function. Exercise is
also associated with longer survival for
those who’ve had breast cancer.
DON'T
Thinking about the past year, she
GIVE IN
advises other cancer patients to accept
TO THE
that there will be bad days but not to
BAD
give in to them.
DAYS “There were some really bad days in there.
Survive the bad days and enjoy the good
ones,” she said. “I told myself, ‘You can have a
bad day. You can have two bad days. But it can't
turn into a week, to two weeks, to three weeks, to
a month, because then it’s so hard to get out of
that hole.’”
“So have your day — call it ‘pity days’ — and then
get back up and keep going because that's your
only option.”
17
