Too Much Info: A Tale of My ER Visit

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

WARNING: Not for the faint of heart. Especially if you’re a guy.

So here’s the scoop on my life…and it’s not a pleasant one. I’ve learned since all this went down a couple weeks back that I have pretty much left all modesty behind and have been dubbed at work Captain TMI. Such is the price of having being able to freely go to the bathroom.

The Wednesday before last night I went to the bathroom about midnight and noticed something a bit unusual…blood. Yes…I went to urinate, it stung a little, it wasn’t a steady stream, and there was a small drop of blood that emerged, too. Now, I’m not always the quickest person, but I come to realize this isn’t something that should be present, even if just a single drop. Okay…note to self…see doctor in morning. This is not a normal problem facing 30-year-old men.

Well, I get up at 3am to pee again, and it hurt even more (no blood, though) and there was less flow…more like a very slow coffee pot drip. I’m freaking out now, as it seems my bladder is emptying at a much faster rate than I’m peeing, and I’m wondering what damage I’m doing to my…yeah. All I can think of is the tip swelling up like a water balloon, waiting to explode.

With this image in mind, I get up, go to work, grab my medical insurance card off my desk, send my boss an e-mail with important attachments in case she needs to move forward on some stuff before I make it back in, look up the nearest medical facility, go to their emergency room, etc. Another note to self…I’m pretty cool, calm and collected in an emergency. Just wondering if I can put this on my resume…but I digress.

The doctor takes a urine sample (that took forever, of course) and examines the site of the problem. My red blood count is normal, and my white blood count is high…which means the white blood cells are out in force fighting an infection, apparently. So, he gives me a prescription for a urinary infection and tries to send me on my way. But I tell him…I still need to be able to pee! He says, we can try to use a catheter.to drain your bladder. I can’t believe I agree to it…but I want it done.

So, this cute young nurse comes in with this plunger lookin’ thing…says that they are going to use lydocaine to numb it, then use the catheter. She leaves, and another nurse comes in, we chat a bit, she starts spreading a substance on the end of Little Lockseer (Okay, it’s my PENIS! There, I said it! PENIS!) and starts to try to go in…I’m gripping the sides of the bed tighter than you could ever know. Nurse #1 comes in…“You didn’t put the lydocaine on yet?” ARGH! Nurse #2 assumed the first one had done it. Meanwhile, I’m assuming both are idiots.

Anyway, turns out they can’t get the catheter in. No…really? I said it was blocked. So they send me off for an ultrasound. Turns out I’m not pregnant, and they can’t see any bladder blockage (I could have told them that…it feels like it is at the exit point, not the source). The doctor asks (when I return) if I had used the bathroom before the scan…nope, I didn’t. So back we go again…and this time I try peeing again. But…this time…NOTHING comes out. I’m freaking out.
I can feel it going through the urethra, but…I have NO idea where it is going. It just HUUUURTS.

We go back to the doctor, who then gives me a prostate exam, just in case. He then set me up with appointment with a urologist set up at 2pm PST. I told him my concern was…I need to pee. He told me that if I just relax and let if flow…and nothing comes out…it won’t cause my urethra or bladder to explode…so…I’m taking his word for it at this point, because that’s all I have.

I would just rather ignore the next five hours before the urologist. Basically, I bounce between laying in bed, trying to go to the bathroom, groaning in pain, and dripping like Mr. Coffee. My boss shows up to drive me to my appointment, and the urologist, after checking things out, announces something I wasn’t too keen on hearing: the opening was almost completely sealed over with scar tissue. I’m like…WHAT???

He then asks how brave I’m feeling…not something you particularly want to hear from a doctor, let alone a urologist. He says he can either go in and widen the opening there…or we can head next door to the hospital to an operating room and they can put me under. Now…my only motivation is to pee. And to pee soon. I will go through as much pain as I need to in order to pee. So…we do it right there and then. He numbs the area with novacaine, and then goes in with a #22 dilating tool (if anyone has an image of this tool they could see me I would SO appreciate it) and scrapes and tears at the scar tissue to widen the opening.

Let’s just say when he got done it was the most glorious feeling bathroom visit I ever had the pleasure of undertaking.

So…in the aftermath, we aren’t sure what caused the scarring, but he seeemed to think it had been building up over years and may have had something to do with a cystoscopy I had done when REALLY young. Oh…and this is fun…until the follow-up this past Thursday I had to take this narrow rubber tube and insert two inches down you-know-where once a day (with the help of a little KY Jelly, at the doctor’s recommendation). Luckily, post-follow-up, I can start to ween myself off that (so to speak), until I get down to once a week.

I learned nothing useful at the follow-up, other than the “opening seems a little dry” which may have aided it in closing up. Until my next follow-up in December, looks like I’ll be drinking a lot of cranberry juice.

So…how was everyone else’s week?

2

Well my twin sister dislocated her elbow and my car got backed into at full speed by this idiot and so now I have an injured neck. But at this point I’m feeling pretty lucky, thanks.

Uh, good luck with your penis!

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Lockseer, I should tell you that I am now officially a female after reading your post. My manly parts turned themselves inside out as they crawled back inside my body and it may be weeks until I coax them out again.*

My sincerest sympathies on what you had to endure… and my feverent prayers that it never happen to me.

  • Oh, I hear Mrs. Stone in the shower. That might do it… <heading off to join her>
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I live to make other people more appreciative of their own lives. :slight_smile:

You know I’m sharing too much when the head of our office comes in to a meeting and asks “So, are we talking about Lockseer’s hoo-hoo again?” God bless her.

5

Dammit, I shouldn’t have read this. I have a prostate exam tomorrow.

I understand it’s pass/fail.

:smiley:

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“Hey, Bob, how’s your penis?”

“Great, John, your penis is looking good!”

“Hey, Chris, how’s the penis looking?”

“Fantastic! The penis is great!”

Okay, I paraphrase.

(And I did a bit of a doubletake at the “I’m not pregnant” line, then had to go back and make sure you really were a guy in the beginning of the post. :smiley: )

E.

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I cried. But I also laughed. Poor Lockseer!

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You are officially a very manly man in my book.

You have surpassed the Marlboro man, Mr. Clean and the Mr. Bounty (paper towel guy).

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In answer to the “how was your week?” question:

On the way into the city to see my daughter in the hospital, my car broke down, on Route 22, by a curve. 18-wheelers zipping by at 50+ mph.

The following day, the visit was somewhat successful, but there was some sort of awful delay at the Lincoln Tunnel, which the radio had given absolutely no clue of, so after getting the junk food my daughter wanted, and dealing with NYC traffic and parking, I got to the hospital exactly 10 minutes before the end of visiting hours. On my way home, I got a call on my cell phone from my husband. “Where are you?” “Just about to try to get on Route 22, why?” “I’m in the ER…”

I’ve had better weeks.

Oh, hope your penis is better.

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You know, a visit to the ER usually is a good reason for boo-boo kisses. I hope there’s a Mrs. Lockseer to administer them. And not your mom.

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I can’t believe I am actually going to post this. About 4 years ago, I had something disturbingly similar happen to me. One night, very late and after much drinking, I noticed what I thought was blood in my urine. Not much, but blood. This was not normal, but I chalked it up to my being sorta drunk and it being mostly dark. As weeks passed it became more and more difficult to pee. I went to the ER, they checked me for a UTI and all STDs. I had a very high white blood cell count, high enough that they really didn’t need to run the test, you could tell by looking at the sample that something was amiss. I was given antibiotics and sent home. A few days later I was no better, I still could barely pee. So I went to a urologist. Fortunately my girlfriend at the time was pretty cool with all this. He looked at me and said “I’ve never seen one so small before”. I assume to this day that he was talking about the hole, not the penis in general. 2 days later I was in the OR having a laser shot into my penis. It took about an hour for the whole procedure, and then I was able to pee. The dr. told me his goal was to have me knocking plates off the shelves when I got home. And so far, it seems to have worked although we still don’t know why this happened. So I feel your pain, quite literally, although it does make me feel kinda good knowing I’m not the only one out there who had something like this happen. Good luck and take care of it.

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Pictures, as requested:

One of these, or maybe one of these sounds. (Yikes!).

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Wow. That’s a kinkster’s playground.

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Lockseer, I’m glad to hear everything is back in working order, and I sincerely hope you never have to go through that again.

I’m going to go faint, now, if you’ll excuse me.

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When my little brother was a baby, my mom noticed he wasn’t peeing as much as you’d expect from a newborn and he’d get all red in the face and strainy-looking. Off to the pediatrician to find out his urethral opening is constrained and they need to do a little procedure to fix it. The medical term for this procedure? A meatotomy.

16

Remind me to tell you about the time I smashed a hole about 3/8" diameter in my penis/upper scrotum.

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Sorry, anybody mind if I just… fold up on this chair over here? Thanks, guys…

…uhhhhh… :eek:

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One of the worst things I ever saw in the hospital was a urology consult for a man who’d had prostate problems some time before, and the neck of his urethra had narrowed. A nurse the day or so before had tried to insert a catheter and mistakenly inflated the tip before it got to the bladder. :eek: :eek: :eek: So, this guy was in a bad way, urine-wise.

Anyhoo, the urologist comes in with this cart of evil devices and proceeds to a) ream the poor guy out with a probe about the size of a turkey baster, then b) do the urethral equivalent of angioplasty, inserting and repetedly inflating a balloon to 300 PSI to widen the bladder neck.

I was in my first week or so of orientation as a nurse. It was all I could do not to faint while I was holding the guy’s hand in what I hoped was a comforting and sympathetic way. And he did feel a whole lot better when it was all over.

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Hey Duke of Rat, what about the time you smashed a hole about 3/8" of a diameter in your penis/upper scrotum?
I’m a girl. I cringe not.

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Well I’m a girl, too, and I was really hoping that no one would ask Dukie about that. I have had some very painful UTIs, but thank Og no one every had to scrape any scar tissue off my girly parts.