Author: No Name

To be clear…I don’t have a job, I have a career. What’s the difference? When you have a job, you go home at the end of the day and focus on your family and personal life. When you have a career, you never, ever, at any point, get to do that completely. You get emails during weddings, and phone calls during funerals (yep….happened…many times). You are expected to be available 24/7 working at all hours of the night and day making sure the business keeps running. When a disease outbreak that shuts down the entire country happens, you are still working from your car, kitchen, living room, bedroom, even in the shower, and on the toilet whether you have paper or not. You work sick, tired, depressed or happy. If you succeed, the team is the reason, if you fail, you are the reason. You are on planes, in hotels, eating bad food, and struggling to exercise in order to keep your sanity and physical health because it’s either that or you will end up with a coronary within the year. 

It is true. I chose this career. I am paid well, get good benefits, and have a lot of perks to be sure. And with all this it can all end in an instant if some CEO determines that laying off 50% of the company will raise the stock price .000000000001 of a percentage point. This is why, the first piece of advise I give ANYONE who has asked the question “what do you recommend I do for my career?” I say, focus on you, and your needs. Make sure you look out for your own personal and professional goals, your health, and your financial future. Because in the end, they will never, no matter how hard you work, no matter how indispensable you think you are, or how loyal they tell you they will be to you, they will never, ever, under ANY circumstance, love you back.

As we come to another financial meltdown that was going to happen, regardless of Covid-19. Just know that many of us will be put out on the street over the next several months. The banks won’t help, and anything the government does will be limited. I can only hope that those of us who went through this in 2007 don’t have to go through it again, and that the folks that called all the unemployed at that time deadbeats, do. Maybe then they will understand that sometimes, just sometimes, financial and health challenges are not the fault of the individual, they just happen.

Rex

a.k.a. Who was the torturous mother fucker who thought this up?

This is the second in a multi-part series of what many men will experience when they learn they have to have prostate surgery.  The goal is to accurately and with a little humor explain some of the things the physician either won’t, doesn’t, or forgets to tell you when you go through the process.  

The next step in the road to surgery is the cystoscopy.  This delightful little piece of evil is designed to be pushed directly into the end of your penis so a physician can display the inside of your bladder, not only to you, but to a group of fledgling wide eyed young students who happen to find their way into the exam room.  No one asks if you want them there, but they show up just the same.

Before they insert this garden hose with a camera on the end into your urethra, they go ahead and ask you to wear with the same non-garment with the rear opening similar to what you wore for the CT.  They will then leave the room for what seems like hours while you lie there waiting for someone to bring you a blanket.  It will be cold.  I recommend bringing a sleeping bag and an electric heater.  This will prevent you from having to lie down in a very cold room, half dressed, with your genitals visible for anyone how might happen into the room.  If the automatic lights go off, just take a nap.  They can wake you when they’re ready (yes…this happened to me).  When someone finally shows up, sometimes the cleaning crew, they will notify the nurse that you’ve been left in the room.  It might be that day, or maybe the next but eventually they’ll show up. 

In fact, a very bright, and extremely cheery nurse, will waltz into the room and grab what is now your incredibly shrinking penis that, if you forgot the sleeping bag, is likely partially frost bitten from the cold and without much warning grab the end and shoot a numbing agent into your urethra.  She has to do this without warning because it gives her time to get out of the way as you shoot three feet off the table, kicking out in all directions with a response similar to “what the fuck was that!?!”  She will then leave the room, and you will be able to settle down for another nap.  If the cleaning crew shows up again, just ask them if they found my keys yet.

When the Urologist finally makes it into the room, they will turn a TV screen in your direction and begin to insert this medieval torture device.  The numbing agent does its job…to a point.  However, once the scope makes it past the prostate into the bladder, all bets are off!  To make matters worse, he will turn and twist this thing inside your body, all the while giving you full color images of things you really weren’t meant to see.  One of them might be an eight-centimeter ball at the base of your bladder that’s not supposed to be there.  It is at this point the doctor will yank the scope out of your body, urine will spill out all over you, the table, and the floor, and you will be thankful your pants and shoes are safely on a chair in the corner of the room.  

The doctor will then tell you to get dressed because the fun for the day is almost over.  The next thing he needs to do is tell you that you have to have surgery.  Upon mentioning surgery, you will be completely incapable of comprehending all the things he’s saying, because you’re still focused on the fact that you have to have surgery.  I suggest bringing a friend who can tell you later all the things that were said.  They should be able to do shorthand at about 220 words per minute because the doctor talks like an auctioneer.  If they can’t though, not to worry.  He’s kind enough to send you home with a brochure because let’s face it, what surgery needs is four color tri-fold handouts.  

Rex

I think I drank moonshine

I’d been seeing a urologist for about five years.  It’s the longest relationship I’ve had outside of marriage.  Suffice it to say he’s become quite acquainted with parts of my anatomy that up until now I had never been acquainted.  I mean who chooses that as a career?  All day long you look at assholes.  Ok, so does the kid workin’ the drive-up window at Starbucks.  However, after seeing my most recent medical bill I’m pretty sure the pain is worth it.

With that said, physicians and nurses try to educate you on what will happen during these events, but they are woefully deficient in their descriptions.  Also, they never tell you “why” you have to do some of these things. So, for the next several articles I’m going to explain my experience in great, and candid detail.  For those of you who read my blog, you likely won’t be surprised at said candor.  For the rest of you…good luck!

The CT Scan with Contrast

Dr. Google describes a CT scan with contrast as “…a noninvasive medical test. It is used to produce multiple images of the internal body organs to diagnose cancer, cardiovascular disease, trauma, musculoskeletal disorders, etc. Contrast agents, also called dyes, are used to highlight the organs, blood vessels, tissues, etc.”

What they fail to tell you is all the work you have to go through to get the test.  The first thing is you have to starve yourself.  If you get hangry like I do that’s not exactly the safest situation for for the bulk of society, especially the ones demanding money a.k.a. healthcare companies.  They then send you to a facility that does these procedures where they have you fill out documents that basically say “if you die, it’s not our fault, even if it is our fault, it’s not our fault so you need to sign these papers to hold us harmless if we mistakenly kill you, so we can look at what might be killing you.

For the benefit of these services, they then tell you that before they put your life at risk, you have to give them money.  This is kind of like bungy jumping.  It might kill you, then again it might not.  It also might just make you wet your pants.  Either way you’ll have a story to tell and some nice pictures when you’re done.  For the benefit of this process they will also ask you for anywhere from several hundred to several thousand dollars depending on if, or what type of health insurance you have. What type of health insurance you have depends on how broke you are, or how cheap your employer.

Once you’ve gone through all that they have you take off all your clothes, any metal, and put on some booties and a gown that’s open in the back so they can parade you through crowds of people waiting for their scans in their open robes.  It wouldn’t be so bad, but let’s face it, most of us having this procedure wouldn’t win any bikini contests, and quite a few spend too many hours training for the hot dog eating contest.  The people you’d prefer to see are young, healthy, and on a beach. This is something you can think about while you lie there half naked freezing your ass off.

Now, when they lie you down, they tell you ALL the things that can go wrong.  This is GREAT because it’s not like you’re nervous already after filling out the paperwork.  Anyway, a very sweet, kind, and FAR too young person helps you onto the table, taking great care not to notice the tattoo you got when you were 20 that has morphed into an unrecognizable blob.

Once on the table they insert an IV.  Now for me this was my first IV ever in my life!  I’ve broken 16 bones, had many illnesses, including pneumonia and to this point I’ve never needed any type of IV.  I managed to make it all this time with no more than an occasional tetanus shot, so the whole ordeal was a little disconcerting. Still, I likely would have done better if the little shit just kept her mouth shut.

Now what they tell you is that once they inject you with the die, it will feel like you wet your pants.  This likely may be true for women, who when they pee themselves everything runs out the back.  This is not true for men.  We pee ourselves down the front.  It’s an entirely foreign feeling.  The kids say you taste metal.  They’re not old enough to remember drinking water from old lead pipes.  Really…that’s the flavor.  It also feels like you took a shot of moonshine out of a rusty still and it burns down your throat all the way down to your toes.  Not a totally uncomfortable feeling, but certainly one that makes you think if you did this too often you might go blind.

It’s also a good thing you’re starving, because it is at that this point, had you just had lunch, it would be on the floor.  It’s not nausea per se, it’s more an odd uncomfortable feeling that lasts maybe a few seconds, but long enough that on a full stomach projectile vomiting might be the result.  Kind of like the reaction you might get seeing a group of elderly and middle-aged half naked people in cheap hospital pajamas waiting in a hallway.

After the scan they send you home, give you another bill, and tell you to wait three weeks for your doctor to call you.  Now, you own your medical records, and truth be told, they are legally obligated to provide you a copy, but that doesn’t keep the desk clerk from acting like you asked for the nuclear launch codes.  So, when their response is “you need permission from your doctor,” your response back should be “Then he can pay the fucking 500.00 dollars I just paid for the test.”  At least that was what I said anyway. It is at this point that you realize you really need a sandwich.  People will come filing out of offices to see the show.  Eventually however, an office manager who knows her ass from a hole in the ground then promises you a copy of the records, which by the way, you get three weeks after the physician.  Better late than never.

Now when you get this report, you don’t really read it, other than to find if you have cancer or not.  If you’re like me, that’s where you go.  You don’t read any other part of the report because that’s the only answer you need.  However, if you’re my wife, you read the entire thing and learn all KINDS of interesting things about your spouse.  Do yourself a favor, don’t Google ANYTHING.  Just ask your doctor about it.  However, I was amused at how many calcium deposits I had on my lungs, kidneys, and spleen.  Basically, all signs of previous injuries.  I told you I was active!

With me it turned out I had a three-quarter inch ball growing out of my prostate into my bladder.  This overly active prostate was affecting my ability to urinate.  More to the point, the more I had to pee, the less I was able, causing me great stress and annoyance.  Also given the fact that is was also causing me to pee blood, it was decided that another test was needed to determine exactly what that ball actually was.  Was it cancer (they still were not positive) or was it something less evil?  So, I had to have another appointment with a physician to have a cystoscopy.  A much more invasive from or torture which I will describe in the next edition of “I can finally pee like a teenager.”

Rex

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