The last week just vanished. When my wife returned from her trip, I hit the pain pills, and the week got blurry. The pain of peeing was so intense and the advice I got was to keep drinking water. Talking to the Nurse the phrase “urethral trauma” came up. Complications: urine is an anti-coagulate, urine is an irritant to blood, and blood triggers an urgency response from the bladder and urethra.
So the pattern became: drink water, wait less than an hour, urgently pee a small bit of urine and some blood and then throb in major urethal pain for nearly an hour until it was time to pee again. This repeated through four days and nights, despite medicine, waking me every 45-60 minutes. I surfed the web, watched 2 seasons of Reno 911 to distract myself, and generally slipped away from the world as I paced from chair to toilet to bed to couch and repeat.
Then Tuesday morning I awoke at 4:45 with an ache in my left side and back. Severe pain again unrelated to the peeing, but so intense. I wondered if it was a kidney? So I called the Urologist on call number and spoke to a very calm dude who asked about bowel movements. Was I cutting back on water to avoid peeing? (yes) was I taking lots of pain medication? (yes) was it possible I was full of shit? (always.) So after about 20 minutes of tears, pacing, shaking and sweating, my bowls moved and the pain switched off like a light. Getting my bowels back to speed required that I drink the requisite water dose, and so I devised a new way to pee where I kept the Klegal muscle tight, but relaxed the sphincter a bit and peed really slowly. No pain, no blood. After five days, peeing became only irritating, if still too frequent. That was the situation yesterday.
Today, I was back in the world. Last night I slept 3 hours straight. I feel pretty good, but I turn 50 tomorrow, and my body isn’t letting me forget some years of neglect.
More later.
