After a very disturbed night due to erections I got up and pooped again. This time it was preceded by really bad bladder spasms and a few centilitres of urine squeezed past the catheter.
Took the bus up to the hospital in time for morning rounds. A more senior urologist was doing rounds and he’d been informed about the trouble with the suprapubic catheter. I had to wait for someone to put in a new one, which would be done on the ward with local anaesthetic.
The treatment room in the urology ward seems to mostly be used as a storeroom, with nurses coming and going all the time to collect supplies and pick up labels from the printer. An operating light had a sign saying that it was faulty and had been reported in March.
A young doctor and a male nurse were going to be replacing the suprapubic catheter. After a bit of a clean the nurse started squirting saline into my bladder, stopping when it got uncomfortable. At the same time the doctor was injecting the local anaesthetic, with a fearsomely long needle. The first batch wasn’t quite enough and I was glad that he believed me when I told him I usually need more.
Once the anaesthetic had taken effect the doctor took the huge thick needle (it looked like a skewer) and started poking it through my belly, causing all sorts of odd sensations. That didn’t work, so he pulled it out and tried again. The second attempt failed, liquid would come out of the needle but when he inserted the catheter nothing came out through it.
The third attempt was also unsuccessful so the doctor scuttled off to consult a more senior colleague. It seems the advice was for more water, to make my bladder easier to find. The fourth and fifth attempts were incredibly uncomfortable as I felt like I desperately needed to pee. I ended up panting and feeling panicky. As they still hadn’t succeeded they let the saline out while the doctor went to fetch his colleague.
The senior doctor seemed to be in a charming mood and he fairly quickly and efficiently got the catheter in and then spent a while stitching it firmly to my belly.
I got dressed and went along to the day room for lunch, feeling a bit shaky. Then I had to hang around all afternoon waiting to be discharged. A nurse came to remove the urethral catheter and left me a supply of night bags but no drugs nor any discharge information.
Eventually another nurse gave me my drugs to take home. My husband insisted that I needed to see a doctor before I left and finally the young one who’d had all the trouble with the suprapubic catheter turned up and discharged me.