About two weeks ago I had my first ever surgery. After a decade of taking great care not to pee on my shoes, because my urine stream had all the velocity of a French military invasion, I decided it was time to see the urologist. I would basically stand in front of the commode, find a comfortable position, and wait for the time it takes to roast a chicken before anything happened. As evidence, my thighs now have permanent marks where I’ve slept sitting on the toilet with a pillow in my lap to at least get some sleep between attempts to urinate.
I’m a very active guy. While my body is almost 55 years old, my mind thinks it’s 16. Seriously, I mountain bike aggressively, ski, rollerblade skate parks, run, rock climb, swim, and dodge sharp objects thrown by my wife. There’s rarely a weekend where I’m not patching some wound from a spectacular fall, or a rock or tree branch. So, to admit that my body was failing me miserably has been quite the bruising to my ego. For while my mind thinks I’m a teenager (just ask said wife), my prostate thinks it’s a 90-year-old dementia patient. I mean it must be that because 30 seconds after I’d peed, I’d have to pee again.
BPH was my condition which is a short way of saying that my prostate was so large that it strangulated my urethra to a point that urination was just a fond memory. The doctor recommended the gold standard of prostate surgery for my condition called a Transurethral Resection of the Prostate, or TURP. What this “Gold Standard” entails is sticking a garden hose with a light on the end and an electrode into your penis to burn away portions of your prostate, in my case the parts pushing into my bladder, preventing me from urinating. If you’re wondering, it really is as bad as it sounds.
When they told me what I needed the doctor gave me a nice four-color tri-fold brochure to read, because evidently surgery needs Marketing. This was supposed to explain the procedure to me and answer all my questions, because let’s face it, doctors fly in and out of the exam room so fast that asking them questions is impossible. I therefore I went to the Internet where, to my amazement, there was a host of information, almost all of it wrong. What I learned was that most people who got this procedure were in considerably poorer physical health, or much older than I, so much of it didn’t really apply. So much for Dr. Google.
So, on faith, I scheduled my surgery for 7:30 a.m. in the morning. I use the term “scheduled” loosely since the surgeon was late. After repeated calls, texts, and emails to me over the weeks before the surgery with threats of financial penalty if I was late or didn’t show, I learned I was evidently the only individual participating in this event under that directive. It obviously didn’t apply to the person doing the surgery, the nursing staff, or anyone else invited to the party.
I learned this when I got to the surgery center and was promptly handed stacks of paperwork to fill out. I was glad my wife was with me since most of it made zero sense. It basically stated that if anyone in the facility mistakenly killed or crippled me that they were held harmless. My wife, an attorney of renown in these matters, looked at the confused look on my face as I pointed this out and said, and I quote “uh huh…good luck with that.” I can assure you, had one of those issues came to fruition, my wife would have made them extremely uncomfortable. I’ve seen her do that for her clients, and all joking aside, I can only imagine what she would do if it were someone she cared about…even it it is her adolescent husband who made her leave her winter hideaway on the beach so she could help me after surgery.
After literally signing my life away, I was ushered back into the pre-op room where I was given what amounted to half a robe, a pair of pressure socks (to prevent blood clotting) and some nice thick fuzzy yellow socks to keep my feet warm. Oh, and they have these really awesome blankets that they pull out of a warmer to keep your feet warm. Where can I get one of these? They’re awesome!
I was also given an IV which was a good thing since I hadn’t eaten or drank anything since the day before. Things started to get pretty interesting when my wife and I were told the doctor would be two hours late for the surgery and then when two hours passed, and then two more hours passed, my wife and I started to become a little frustrated to say the least. Now…I was pretty tired, having not eaten or had water for 23 hours at this point, but I still feared for the staff. At that point I would have happily gone to jail after pummeling one of them for their PB an J.
However, what I really worried about was my wife. She was starting to get annoyed at the lack of communication coming from the staff. She’s volatile on a good day, but with me lying in bed with tubes coming out of me and children for care givers giving half answers to her inquiries she started to get a little terse. Also, a little advice for the nurses in the world. Never tell anyone that the “doctor is busy” ever! It discounts the patient’s importance and makes it sound like the doctor is the one you serve. It especially doesn’t work with an attorney whose professional ego is on par with any surgeon. It’s not going to play well…and it didn’t. For the safety of all I had to tell the nurse I was leaving. It was at that point the surgeon finally appeared. I’m glad too since I would not have gone back.
Within seconds of the doctor’s appearance they quickly rolled me into the OR. I can only assume since I, on my way out, was going to get a refund of what I had to pay for this ride. I was happy to see the anesthesiologist though. In my opinion he was the most important person in the room. I made sure I was nice to him. He was going to keep me alive. When I lay there on the operating table, he told me I was going to feel drunk. I have never in my life felt drunk, so I didn’t have a point of reference. I was telling him a story about why I don’t drink and the next thing I knew my wife and the preop nurse were standing at the end of my bed in the recovery room. I lost an entire 90 minutes and had zero recollection of any of the events that happened after I started my story. My surgery was done, my wife was at my side, and I had a nice catheter as proof that something had happened.
I knew going in I was going to go home with a catheter but having a small garden hose inserted into something that was never intended to have anything inserted is extremely uncomfortable. As I started to come out of the anesthetic the nurse asked me how I felt and it took a few minutes for me to realize what was happening, and with every passing moment my discomfort was turning into pain. The nice nurse gave me a little pain pill and I can tell you that as of today, a little more than two weeks later, that’s the only pain pill I’ve taken. That’s not the only pain I’ve felt, but I’m used to a little pain, and I don’t need pills for that either.
I’ll spare you the comedy act of having a 20 something nurse help me get dressed with a catheter connected to me, so let’s just say it was not a pleasant experience. All I’ll say is my legs were still covered with so much blood that I was grateful I was completely out cold during the surgery. I was also glad I had some cheap sweatpants from Walmart. Had it been anything more I would have been a little upset, as it was, I just wanted to get the hell out of there.
The night at home was interesting. Suffice it to say, having a six-foot hose with a bag on the end inserted into your penis makes moving very difficult and very painful. When I finally made it into my man cave and my wife, bless hear heart, took great care of making sure I had everything I needed, I settled down for the evening. She was a little concerned for me, but in the end decided she’d go to bed and leave me to my own devices. This was a good thing because when I awoke the next morning with one leg over the right arm of the chair and one leg over the left, a position that alleviated all the pain, I was thankful she didn’t have to wake up to see that. I, myself, thought it was hilarious.
So fast forward to 4 a.m. the morning after surgery. If you’ve never seen a catheter, it is a long tube about the size of a garden hose. OK…I’m joking, it’s about as big as a standard auto fuel line. Still a size that should never be intended to be shoved into a penis. To keep it all in place there is a balloon on the end that is inflated once it is inside your bladder. The nurse walked me through the procedure for removing the catheter, and while I was none too excited about going through the process, I was more than happy for it to be over.
The nurse walked me through what needed to happen so I waddled into my workshop in the basement, basically the only way to describe how to move with this contraption attached to you, got a pair of scissors from the peg board, and went to work. The procedure goes something like this: You reach down, about a foot below where the hose is hanging and cut it off. This deflates the hose and allows the catheter to be removed. They then tell you to stand there and let gravity do the work. However, they left out a few key, and in my opinion, extremely important details.
The first detail they left out was that when you cut the hose, urine and blood stream out of you like one of those fountains you see in Italy where the little boy is holding onto a pot and pissing all over the ground. There’s nothing you can do to stop it either. In fact if you do try, the pain is something I will spare you from description. So the only thing you can do at this point is to let gravity take the hose out because if you touch it, you start to get quite dizzy and the idea of lying in my own blood and urine without so much as a punch thrown is just humiliating.
What they also fail to tell you is just…how…fucking…far…this thing is inserted into your body. What I thought was only going to be a few inches of hose ended up being about a foot and a half long. I’m sure it was only a minute or so, but the process of this traveling along my urethra was literally torture, and I was getting very light headed. I wanted to sit down.
I’m so thankful the nurse had the forethought to tell me to do this in the bathtub. It literally looked like I had butchered a rabbit. Seriously, this is not something you want to see coming out of you. What you basically have is blood, urine and tissue from inside your body pooled below you as you straddle to keep your feet dry. No one wants to see that. It took a bit and it was kind of uncomfortable until the end of the tube passed my prostate. At that point I was so dizzy from the pain that I only hoped it would be over soon. Once it was done, I had to sit on the edge of the tub for a bit to get my wind back.
The next little gem was passing copious amounts of blood for the first few times I peed. After that things calmed down quite a bit. Now I’m back to almost normal with a clump of blood passing each time I pee. Not enough to make it miserable, but enough to annoy me. I’m told that this will happen for a couple of months before all the scabs have passed and my prostate heals. I can honestly say that I’m glad I had it done, I just hope I never have to do it again.
Rex