Catheter

By Friday lunchtime I've got a severe pain in my bladder and I can hardly take a pee. All I can do is lie on my back, wince with each stabbing pain, and groan. A nurse comes by and I tell that I think I may have a bladder infection. They fetch a doctor. He prods, pokes and taps at my abdomen. A light tap is enough to make me shout in pain. A small group of doctors and nurses discuss what is to be done, there are veiled suggestions of checking the prostate, but the conclusion is drawn; no infection.

The blue curtain is whipped into place and minutes later I've got my bits sticking out of a hole in a large sheet of waterproof paper. The doctor applies some lube, and pushes a plastic tube inside me. I can't say it was gentle, though it probably was. It's supposed to be painless... On the second attempt I was "arrrrrrghing" at the top of my voice and eventually the tube entered my bladder. He had not yet connected the bag and so urine starts to pour everywhere. The nurse rapidly connects me up and then all eyes are on the calibrations on the catheter bag to see how much comes out.

It's a Foley catheter which has a small balloon inside the bladder to stop the tube falling out, or in my case, to stop the patient extracting it! Catheters are scaled according to "the French Gauge".  The French gauge was devised by Joseph-Frédéric-Benoît Charrière, a 19th-century Parisian maker of surgical instruments, who defined the "diameter times 3" relationship. 
The catheter is now my constant companion. I can feel it every time I bend at the waist. It's the strangest thing; not being able to stop yourself peeing. You can feel it draining out drip by dribble, non-stop. All day, all night. Periodically, the nurse measures the contents of the bag, and sometimes she empties it.

The Ward - H Bosch was 'ere

When I come to some sort of sensibility on Friday morning I find that I'm sharing a ward with 3 others.

There's an old Irish guy who knows everything. He tells the consultant what he should be doing. He tells the nurses how to do their jobs. He phones people and tells them how the nurses and doctors don't know what they are doing. He mutters to himself, probably to argue that he knows better than himself. He says one thing to one person and two minutes later he says something else to another. Total bullshitter, the whole time, non-stop. There's no peace. If I could move I'd go and shut him up.

There's a young father who wanders about carrying his catheter bag. It's full of a mixture of urine and blood, splashing about in a frothy mix for all to see. He speaks an East European language. His wife and small child come to visit. The child plays on the ward floor whilst her parents cuddle and my monitor alarms go off and the pain or drugs move my mind to strange places.

There's a guy, maybe late 40's, who has a fractured skull. He fell over and banged his head, but he doesn't know where or how. There's blood from his ears, but it's apparently a minor injury and they will send him home. He doesn't have any family. His mother died a few year

s ago. He lived with his mother all his life. He has a friend who might help. He has a speech impediment and maybe he's not the sharpest stick in the box. He's a floor polisher who used to work at a nearby hospital, but he lost his job. He stares, mainly at me. He stares whilst the nurses do things for me. I'm trying to take a pee in a bottle, and he stares. He stares while I'm in pain and about to get a catheter installed. He freaks me out. Shudders go up my spine.

The food is so bad that I can't eat it. Dry, over cooked, tasteless, and not enough to drink. There's no attempt to substitute for milk. A diet like this will have me losing pounds!  (After-thought: Why did nobody talk to me about nutrition for bone growth?)

They move the Irish bullshitter out of the ward. Not much later they wheel in a guy whose

bed is festooned with monitors, oxygen bottles, etc. He has a mask on, covering the site of the surgery, presumably a broken jaw, but he seems to be able to speak. The gas hisses and monitors beep. Maybe I looked like that the previous evening. Later some friends come to visit him. It's like a party. Joking, laughing, eating and drinking.

Pete appears at the door. At last a friendly face. He brought me ginger beer, jaffa cakes, and other sweet eats. It's nice to hold a relatively normal conversation, but I'm wired, a very strange over-alert state of fight or flight. It's a state of near panic. I really want to get out of the ward as quickly as possible. The nurses seem annoyed when I ask if Pete could have a cup of tea. I realise that apart from mealtimes, and my small plastic glass of orange just, I'm not drinking anything. The p

leasure of a cup has been absent for quite some time. I've been living on a drip.

Pete leaves.

The new patient needs to use the toilet so the nurse gives him a bed pan. He misses it, and then tries to clean up the mess ith his hands but just makes it worse. The nurses are angry, the ward stinks like... I don't know, but it stinks and nobody opens a window. I feel very ill.

A couple of hours later I am told that my request to move to a private ward has been granted. A nurse helps me move to a chair with wheels. She piles my bike gear, smashed helmet, and other chopped-up belongings in plastic bags on top of me, I feel like a bag lady. Then she wheels me off to another part of the hospital, (jeez the corridors are cold) and into a tiny single room that's full of furniture. But at last I have peace and quiet.

I tell the nurse that I don't want anythig and that I'm going to sleep. She tells me that I have to wait until I have had my obs done, and she's given me my drugs for the night.

She comes back a couple of hours later. I refuse the Tramadol because it gives me wierd spooky dreams. Imagine Hieronymous Bosch creatures and scenery on a sort of board game filled with little boxes each containing Bosch's monsters and moving around like

some 2-dimensional Rubik Cube.

I refuse another painkiller because it's an anti-inflammatory and shouldn't be used for bone fractures (according to the therapist). The nurse argues with me because she has got her instructions and the doctor knows best. I tell her to speak to the doctor and consultant and the therapist. Next day the drug regime has changed.

That night I sleep well. The catheter means that I can't roll over, but I do so in my sleep and the bed gets wet.