A Road Less Travelled

I don’t expect most readers of this blog to care, but just in case, consider this fair warning that this post will mention urine and bladders. If that bothers you, don’t read it.

So, on the other side of the curtain at the Emergency Room was a guy having a catheter put in. Seeing as how the curtains are not remotely soundproof, we found out more about this guy than we ever wanted to know. Before the catheter was put in, the doctor informed him there would be ’some pressure’. “Is this gonna hurt?”, he asked. Theresa and I looked at each other, having already translated ’some pressure’ as doctor-speak for ‘lots of pain’. “There will be some pressure,” the doctor repeated, and Theresa and I almost died trying not to laugh out loud. (Note the bit about the curtain being not remotely soundproof…)

Really though, it’s not nice to laugh at people who are having catheters put in. Perhaps I should even feel some solidarity with my fellow ER patients on the subject of urine. One could claim that the entire hospital experience is defined by the protocol by which the establishment tries to regulate and measure the patient’s urine. I wouldn’t make the claim personally, but someone somewhere probably could. And the whole catheter moment was still pretty funny…

In my previous post I mentioned giving urine sample for the first time, and dragging the IV stand along on a trip to the bathroom, but this was just the beginning. The next installment in my adventures came while I was in the holding room waiting for surgery. To the great surprise and confusion of the staff, I requested to use the bathroom. Apparently, people in that part of the hospital just don’t use the bathroom, and no one had ever asked such a thing before, because no one could figure out which bathroom I could use. Eventually they did figure it out, but of course the process involved a wheelchair and the ever present IV stand.

The real fun started after surgery. First off, I had to tell the nurse every time I needed to the use the bathroom. This shouldn’t have been a big deal, as she was in there every hour or so checking my blood pressure anyway. But somehow at two in the morning, in pain and tired after having had surgery, it was difficult to muster the logic that said I needed to just tell her, and very tempting to fall back on my natural philosophy of, “I’d rather not talk about it, so maybe if I ignore it, it will go away”. Having to request help every time I needed to go to the bathroom was officially my least favorite part of the whole hospital experience.

In the bathroom I was faced with an odd device taking up the front half of the toilet bowl. I correctly deduced from the numbering that this was used to measure, er, output. (Remember the bit earlier about regulating and measuring the patient’s urine? I wasn’t really exaggerating.) Even in my slightly groggy state, I found this rather intriguing, and discovered over the course of the night that my bladder seems to hold about 500 to 600 ccs at a time. (Hey, I warned you at the beginning of the post.) I have conflicting reports on how this compares to the average size adult bladder, so if anyone has a reliable source on average bladder sizes, do let me know.

Regardless of how this compares to the average, my nurse was impressed with me. When she was going over my status with the day shift she told them that my vitals were good, I was doing well (hey, after all, I am very healthy according to other hospital staff), and that I was ‘voiding’ very well. “1100 ccs during the night,” she told them, and the room filled with murmurs of impressed affirmation. That has to be among the weirdest compliments I’ve ever gotten…

Later I noticed the whiteboard on my wall. It had the date, the names of the nurses, and certain cryptic instructions. Under “BRP protocol (funky notation not entirely unlike an equal sign) assists” and “reg”, was now written “voids”.

Yay for me.