Hey Friends,
I've had the suprapubic for emptying my bladder for about a year and a half
now and it has worked pretty well. Within the last week or two it has
stopped working efficiently and I'm not sure what the problem is. I've been
using catheters of all sorts for twenty years now so I'm quite familiar
with all of the things that can go wrong with them. What is happening now
is that the thing will just refuse to flow. I'm drinking plenty, the
catheter is well irrigated and clear, and yet the liquid still will not
flow. I'll even start everything new (bag, catheter, etc). irrigate a few
times; and then by the end of the day, or in the early morning, (especially
if I'm not careful and fall asleep too deeply, and wake up with an extreme
case of it) I'll find myself with increasing levels of disreflexia(you
know, the kind that makes your body convulse every 15secs or so and leaves
you with the headache from hell). Until I use the 60cc syringe to draw the
liquid out. There are usually about 3 syringe-fulls in the bladder by that
point. When I begin to irrigate it can be quite difficult to pull, but the
strange part is that the urine is clear, with little/no sediment build-up.
After the initial difficulty in starting the emptying pull, the pull
becomes easy as it normally was. The other strange thing however, is that
if I stop drawing the liquid out, it just refuses to flow out on its own,
as it normally used to.
I did subsequently make some changes to my arrangements, and they did seem
to help things a little bit, but the flow-stoppage is still happening. I
cut the bed bag from the tubing and now have the tubing going in as direct
and as downhill a path as possible into an open container (and this did
work for awhile but the flow is still negligible and still ends up with me
having the distended bladder problem).
I seem to remember the urologist saying that I would likely have to
increase the size of the catheter as I aged, so that might be the solution,
but I've made the earliest MD appointment I could for Dec 12, and a phone
conversation tomorrow.
I pretty much value you alls' experience over anything else so I'm
wondering if any of you have experienced these symptoms. And if so, what
can be done to fix the situation? I would like to know if this is a unique
experience, or if other quads have adapted to similar situations. Thank you
so much for your time and consideration.
Dylan
PS. Oh yeah, on a completely different topic, do any of you play World of
Warcraft by an chance? If you do, and you want to, send me an email. I have
been playing for over a year now and I can't believe how far I've gotten,
considering I'm a quadriplegic. Its great fun, and just as in the real
world, we have to find ways to adapt to our handicaps and I've figured out
ways to work around my shortcomings so that I can at least contribute to a
team effort. Its fun and challenging.
- [QUAD-L] Supra-pubic question Dylan
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