3rd catheter in urine retention

I'm surprised David (Purgatory) hasn't responded by now.

He as been assigned the role of Katheter King here on HW

Mel

yobiks,

sorry for the delay, been out of town a lot today.

yes, unfortunately, i am the king of catheters, both foley and suprapubic. in the first 2 years of my pc journey, i spent a total of 1 1/2 years on caths, and was on a total of 21 of them. its possible you might suffer in a small pool of men, post surgery, of 2-4%, who end up having chronic stricture issues. very much like subic squid reported above. he was lucky that his ended fairly quickly. mine never did. i ended up with 6 operations to clear strictures, plus 2 emergency dialations (would never wish that on you or any one else). my doctor had never seen anyone's bladder neck close up as fast mine did, in one case, it was 100% closed 30 days after a laser guided day surgery.

if your continues, dont be surprised if your uro doesnt want to put a scope up your weiner, and take a good look around. hopefully it is jus swelling, and not a true stricture. you know by now what a bloated bladder can feel like, and probably know by now that there are worse things than wearing a cath.

in my case, i had radiation for a failed surgery, and the radiation destroyed my bladder and bladder neck, i had to have a bladder by-pass surgery, and now urinate through a stoma into a bag.

please keep in touch. trust your blockages dont turn into an epic adventure like mine, lol.

good luck

david in sc

yobiks,

as much as i hate catheters and all things related catheter, i found out that severe blockages were much worse than having a cath long term. kind of lesser of evils.

david

Guys,

Can I relate a er .. 'funny' story without being too offhand / morbid / not-funny ? I don't want to upset the veterans on this thread with my superciliousness, so apologies beforehand if I do upset anyone.

OK. Here goes. Last summer I was on holoday a couple of hundred miles from home. Little backwater place. I did the journey on a single tank (no getting out to pee) and ate junk food all that day. Then I went to a pub and had three pints of local ale. Most enjoyable. It is great to be able to hold one's bladder like that. Went back to the hotel for a pee and noticed a few red-ish dribbles but not much more. Nothing I could do except worry, and go to bed. I have never had a catheter since 1996. This was new to me.

3am and nature calls, so I get up and go to the batchrrom. Nothing. On top of that is the horrible sensation that I am next in that "Alien" movie to give birth through a split belly. I phone for a taxi to go to the nearest A&E (accident and emergency) which is a 30 minute drive.

Get to the backwater A&E and assessed by a sleepy nurse. By this time I am literally "busting". She goes off and comes back with a catheter and puts it on the tray next to the trolley which by now I am squirming in agony on.

The nurse says to me "I can do male catheter, but not if you've had prostrate cancer. You'll have to wait to see the doctor. He should be here soon"

Did she say "soon" ? I have never known time pass so slowly. In fact a definition of time should include an index of real or perceived subjective pain. The greater the pain, the longer the ticks on the universal chronometer.

I honestly don't know if it was 30 seconds or thirty minutes. All I was aware of was this gross bladder pain and a tiny mocking voice in my head that kept repeating this prayer that I had read on a display in a urology museum cabinet. It was at the Hunterian Museum in Lincolns Inn Field, London a year or so before.

"Lord, when though takest me, let it be not through the bladder" [ This was the "Prayer of the 18th century Barber-Surgeons of London" written beneath some instruments for extracting bladder stones - without anaesthetic ].

They had a lot of experience extracting uroliths (bladder-kidney stones) and were well aware of the comparative pain that men died with / of / from. I was begining to understand the meaning of 'death before PK's' -- morphine and so on.

Perhaps it happened as soon as the nurse was out of sight - my sense of time was distorted by pain. I turned to the packaged catheter, tore off the protective paper, spat on the business end and gently worked it up my urethra. It seemed quite natural even though I had never done it before. [ I had removed a cather years ago in 1996 after getting fed-up with it for three weeks post-surgery, but that was the limit of my experience.] Anyhow, it worked & the only problem was I had neglected to turn the valves on this blasted contraption off; so my urine went all over the trolley and then the floor.

When the doctor finally arrived he tried to do the procedure with a gigantic catheter (I mean 5mm diameter at least) . He got it up so far, but I wouldn't let him push it past the ancient anastomisis which I guessed was a natural place to say " .. enough is enough {sucker. .. you've had your break, now let me have mine} .. ". In his clinical notes / report to my uro he wrote "Unable to catheterise patient, however he has managed to urinate successfully today".

If that isn't a case of CYA I don't know what is. Don't blame him really. Take home message is: next time I have to go to A&E (never I hope) I will invent a false name and address, just to avoid the complications of being a very long term survivor of a chronic & terminal disease. They (the hospital staff) were I believe too scared to touch me, until the doctor had woken up and got dressed and read up on catheterising prostate patients. Had I not acted out of initiative hours before, I could well have joined my friends in urolith purgatory.

Sam

hey yobikes sorry for the spelling, but with being pluged up and having the surgen diagonise the problem you have i would recomend seeing another uroligist. their insight(the new uroligest) bypasses what the surgen did and will start a new outlook on the situiation and a new way to aproach the situayion. i been where you are at ,another surgen ,2 weeks, and i was pissing again. my original surgen was too proud to admitt to a problem and never looked pass filling my bladder with water seeing if i could piss and send me home with a cather. case closed on my part. my number is 6019160828. ill disscusse it with you and you can ask david, purgatory vettmam jeff if im for real call me. neil, been there done that.

thanks david yobikes needs to talk to me but other than that im doing fine. cant wait to get to jeffs for the gettogether neil

Getlemen- Thanks ever so much for your concern. Talked to my uro monday and he now wants me to wait until 4/14 before attempting to pull the foley catheter again. I asked him about strictures and he said no because they take more time. My initial time to healing of the anastamosis was 9 days. In my path report there is comment on excission of the bladder margin. This came up benign but I am beginning to wonder if this is part of the problem.

    Just got done talking to Neil- This website is a powerful resource! It sounds like he is right. My symptoms are the same as what he experienced. It is probably some tissue at the anastamosis floating into the urethra when I try to pee. My surgeon is going to use a cytoscope to check out the anastamosis for excess tissue. He already told me he suspected something of the sort. He thought it might involve one of the stitches and might resolve itself once the stitch dissolves. I am so grateful for the support.