It'll be five weeks since I had the supra pubic catheter fitted on Saturday. Has it all settled down after the initial issues, you ask? Not really, no.
When I last wrote, I had been back into hospital, because my catheter wasn't working. They discovered that I had a urinary tract infection (UTI) and that the catheter was fine. They sent me home, but without any antibiotics telling me to drink lots of water.
I did just that. I probably drink a few litres of water a day anyway, so within a couple of days, I felt comfortable that the UTI had been flushed out.
There's been a couple of occasions where the catheter has got blocked and I've felt my bladder filling up. Without a UTI it isn't a problem, as I can hold onto my bladder as normal - especially as now I'm taking Oxybutynin three times a day. Oxybutynin relaxes the bladder muscle. Not to the point that I piss my pants, it just stops the muscle going into spasm, causing random squirts.
Anyway, the district nurse comes round and gives the catheter a flush. That basically means they squirt some sterile water through the catheter into the bladder and it should clear the blockage and come straight back out.
I don't know why it kept blocking. Neither did the professionals, so they put it down to 'teething problems'. The only important thing is that it hasn't blocked for a couple of weeks now, so I'm happy with that.
So, we're on the 'home straight' now and it's finally starting to settle down, right? No, not quite. I woke up one night with a bit of pain where the entry site of the catheter is. It was a burning pain, but it wasn't bad enough to stop me getting back off to sleep.
Over the course of the next day the pain got considerably worse. The wound was weeping - it had been since the day after the operation, so I wasn't that concerned - and it smelled rotten. I called the doctor out and he took one look and told me exactly what I expected to hear: it was infected.
Fantastic! Another week on antibiotics. Drinking plenty of water wasn't going to clear that up.
The doctor told me that if I've been weeping since the operation, I probably come out of hospital with the infection and had it the whole time.
The course of antibiotics has cleared the infection up nicely. The site has dried up and the rotting flesh smell has gone.
For an entire seven days, I have free of issues and everything seems to have settled down, but I'm not counting my chickens just yet.
Regards,
Dan
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