Hey everyone, I want to profusely thank my sis Katy for helping with blog posts over these past few weeks. She also helped in countless ways around our house, and with our kiddo, as I have recovered from surgery. Katy headed back home to Eugene yesterday, and I’ll resume writing the posts in this blog.

As mentioned previously, my bladder was nicked during the surgery, resulting in me wearing a catheter for two weeks. Those two weeks are indeed over (thank goodness) — the catheter came out yesterday. I am now basically re-learning how to pee, which is a painful, trial-and-error process. I was hoping to write a celebratory post today about being catheter-free, but it seems I’m not quite out of the woods yet.

Candidly, I’ve struggled with a lot of anger about this whole bladder “nick” and all the misery it’s caused me. Let me just vent a bit. Sometimes we cancer patients just need to vent — here we go:

• I had no idea what the #$%& I was doing: As an ostomy patient, I received very detailed (honestly fantastic) instructions and guidance from wonderful ostomy nurses, really focused on day-to-day management of emptying and changing ostomy bags. But there wasn’t anything comparable on life with a catheter, except a video that said I need to clean the drainage bag with bleach every day.
• The bleach cleanings: So I think these instructions were maybe(?) excessive, but I was terrified of getting a UTI, so I diligently followed them: any time I changed the catheter drainage bag (twice a day: once in the evening, and once in the morning), I thoroughly cleaned the drainage bag with soap and water, and then let it soak in a diluted bleach solution. This involved using a large syringe to pump the drainage bag full of the bleach solution.
• Very limited mobility with the “night bag”: I had a large drainage bag for sleeping, with a hook — if I needed to move around, I carried it by the hook (or tried a few different methods to tote it). The problem was that this bag had large, rather inflexible tubing and I had to move very slowly, very gingerly lest I bump the tubing in just the wrong way: voila, a painful tugging feeling…
• Mobility challenges with the “leg bag”: For daytime use, I had a smaller drainage bag that attached to my leg via (uncomfortable) velcro straps. Admittedly, it was easier to walk around with this — kind of. The hospital sent me home with a fabric / velcro strap to secure this to my leg, but that quickly got stretched out, which meant it kept slipping down my leg. Which resulted in that painful tugging feeling..
• Lots of time experimenting with hacks: As I was flying blind, I ended up googling alternative catheter securement devices, and bought a few options on amazon — these were adhesive, so I spent a lot of time shaving my legs, experimenting with the right position. This definitely included some failed experiments (I do not recommend the “swivel”-style device) … that resulted in hours of considerably painful tugging.
• Very little sleep: extended catheter use can often result in bladder spasms; I was prescribed oxybutynin to deal with these. The most common side effect of oxybutynin is dry mouth, and it’s a humdinger, in my experience — I had an overwhelming urge to continuously drink water. This made sleep well-nigh impossible. There are tips online for dealing with the dry mouth, but these are all daytime stuff (chew gum, suck on ice) — you can’t do them while you’re sleeping. So I didn’t sleep much.

Given all the above, I am thrilled that the damn catheter is out of me, and I do hope the current adjustment period back to normal bladder function doesn’t last too long. I think my situation (catheter + ostomy) must be a fairly rare thing with LAR surgery patients; otherwise I think I would have had more instructions on how to get through it.

Fingers crossed, next week goes more smoothly…