And so it goes on

The health — or rather ill-health — saga continues.

At the beginning of May we decided to go away for a few days, the first time we’ve had a ‘holiday’ kind of break since my operation in December. Just a little break for a change of scene and a bit of pampering with other people doing the catering for us… There were a couple of days when the weather was good enough to do a bit of walking, about as much as I could manage, or to go and visit a nearby National Trust property. The food was good, the room was comfortable, the setting was pleasant. So it was nice break. Except for the last night when I developed acute urinary retention, and was awake much of the night trying unsuccessfully to empty my bladder. If you’ve never had this experience, just take it from me that it’s a painful one.

Fortunately we weren’t too far from home; but even so, the drive home was painful. By the time we arrived, Urology wouldn’t agree to see me because I presented my situation wrongly, and they told me to contact my GP, but by that time it was too late to get an appointment. Instead the GP suggested I should phone 111 and contact the out-of-hours service. An interesting experience, where you’re faced with a barrage of questions obviously being read off the screen of some iDiagnosis app. My favourites included ‘Are there any blisters around the genital area?’ ‘Have you recently had sex with anyone who might have had an STD?’ and ‘Have you recently been suffering severe breathlessness?’ (I’ve since discovered this last can be a symptom of sepsis, so I’m glad I didn’t have it. Or, incidentally, any of the others.) The result was, I was given an appointment to see a clinician within about an hour, though it did involve a 15 mile drive to Bicester.

The doctor I saw had a feel of my abdomen and confirmed that I had a palpable bladder. Yes, I could have told him that. He catheterized me: the first size he tried to insert was too big, so he had to use a smaller 12-bore instead, which successfully drained about a litre of urine. He then prescribed tamsulosin to stretch the passage, and an antibiotic because he believed I had a urinary infection. (I was sceptical about this, having been on ciprofloxacin for about 8 weeks, but …) And sent me away for the weekend.

First thing on Monday morning I tried to contact my surgeon to tell him what had been going on; he phoned me back with an appointment for his clinic the following day. Which we attended, and he attempted to perform a cystoscopy but couldn’t insert it because of the narrowing of the urethra. This at least confirmed that this was the problem, so he admitted me as an urgent case to perform an urethrostomy.

Urethrostomy: (an endoscopic procedure typically performed under general anesthesia. A thin tube with a camera (endoscope) is inserted into the urethra to visualize the stricture. Then a tiny knife is passed through the endoscope to cut the stricture lengthwise and open the flow of urine. Wikipedia.)

No theatre time available that evening, so I had to wait till the following day, and in the mean time my bladder was full again. This time they didn’t want to insert another catheter, so they drained it by inserting a needle into the bladder through my abdominal wall. It sounds worse than it felt — though indeed, I wasn’t looking — and the worst thing was them pressing on my abdomen to get the urine to come out through the needle which was only the size of a hypodermic. It took a while, but it was ahuge relief, and kept me comfortable until the time of the procedure late the following morning.

It didn’t take long, which meant the general anaesthetic didn’t leave me as groggy as the last one I had on Christmas Eve. The stricture was cut, I was left with another catheter in place, but at least the choice this time of whether I wanted a leg bag, or a short tube with a tap on the end that I could drain at will, with the option of a larger night bag while I was asleep. I chose the second: the leg bag was really not something I wanted. Though the catheter with tap was also not a comfortable thing to have around, principally because it was in the tube where I’d recently had the knife.

One week on: catheter removed; TWOC satisfactorily passed — though this time the nurse tells me (which I didn’t want to hear) that success is only provisional in a sense, because the ‘trial’ continues through the following two or three days, when, if you have any recurring problems with retention, you need to contact Urology and be re-admitted. At least if it does happen again, I will know how to describe my condition in the right way and be able to insist on being admitted.

For the time being, it’s a huge relief to be catheter-free, able to pass urine more easily, and just feeling a lot better. Yesterday I had an appointment with the bone infection unit, where the consultant was pleased with what he heard about my improvement while taking the ciprofloxacin. The pain in the pelvis has more or less completely gone. I can walk again, though I could still benefit from some physiotherapy to build up the core strength I lost during the weeks I couldn’t walk. The antibiotic still has three more weeks to run, and he said I should take it to the end. He can’t give an unconditional promise, but he’s confident that that should ‘almost certainly’ clear the infection completely. He wasn’t planning to do another scan because at this stage it was unlikely to provide any helpful information. I should carry on with life when the course of antibiotics finishes, and contact them only if there’s any recurrence of symptoms. So I suppose that’s good news.

We’re not completely out of the woods yet, and the next part of the adventure sounds so scary I haven’t even dared to google it. (Watch this space.) But we may be getting nearer to being in sight of the end of it. Perhaps then I’ll be able to blog about something more cheerful than my pelvic regions and bladder.