Penultimate health update
Jul. 26th, 2018 10:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drwexYesterday I went back to the urologist's office to have the final procedure done. Things went OK and I'm now plastic-free and stone-free. Follow-up in six months to have an ultrasound. Like all these visits I learned a lot and I've got a data sheet I want to summarize (but left at home) relating to diet.
The following makes ME cringe so here goes the cut
The rules around medical privacy are just freakin' weird. So, I'm having a procedure that, not to put too fine a point on it, involves shoving technology up my dick. This doesn't require me to get into a dressing gown, just drop my trousers to my ankles, pull my shirt up and lie back. To do this, the doctor and the nurse exit the room after handing me a towel. So I can expose my genitals, cover them with a towel, so they can walk back into the room and remove the towel.
I... got nothing.
I was nervous about the amount I'd have to deal with consciously - see above. It's basically a local anesthetic in the sense that the first thing that goes up there is a whole lot of numbing gel. So you get the initial burning then don't feel anything in your dick for a while, as they're fishing around in your bladder.
Turns out that taking the medicine I was prescribed turns the urine orange (we all knew this) so that makes it hard to get a clear bacterial stain reading - almost certain to generate a false positive - and makes the urine in my bladder cloudy so it's hard to see the plastic widget they're trying to grab. This means pumping (more) liquid into my bladder right after they've had me drain it to give them a urine sample. Feeling like one needs to pee while having hardware in the pee hole is an entirely new sensation.
There was a lot of fishing around. Afterward, the nurse explained to me that the stent device curls and if it curls the "wrong way" - whatever that means - it's harder to grasp and extract. It took a while, but it eventually got removed. I didn't watch.
I was a lot wobbly afterward - technically I could have driven myself home but fortunately had Thing 1 to drive me. I passed out for a couple hours once home and felt better after that. Today is better still - the first time in months I haven't had a gremlin actively tapping (or worse) my testicles.
The urologist was emphatic about not wanting to see me for six months, at which point we'll do a kidney ultrasound to see how things look. The definitive diagnostic tool is still a CT scan, but that's a lot of radiation to get on a regular basis so we'll go with something milder unless there's evidence of another stone.
Which there should not be, if I do things the right way, about which more in the next medical post.
The following makes ME cringe so here goes the cut
The rules around medical privacy are just freakin' weird. So, I'm having a procedure that, not to put too fine a point on it, involves shoving technology up my dick. This doesn't require me to get into a dressing gown, just drop my trousers to my ankles, pull my shirt up and lie back. To do this, the doctor and the nurse exit the room after handing me a towel. So I can expose my genitals, cover them with a towel, so they can walk back into the room and remove the towel.
I... got nothing.
I was nervous about the amount I'd have to deal with consciously - see above. It's basically a local anesthetic in the sense that the first thing that goes up there is a whole lot of numbing gel. So you get the initial burning then don't feel anything in your dick for a while, as they're fishing around in your bladder.
Turns out that taking the medicine I was prescribed turns the urine orange (we all knew this) so that makes it hard to get a clear bacterial stain reading - almost certain to generate a false positive - and makes the urine in my bladder cloudy so it's hard to see the plastic widget they're trying to grab. This means pumping (more) liquid into my bladder right after they've had me drain it to give them a urine sample. Feeling like one needs to pee while having hardware in the pee hole is an entirely new sensation.
There was a lot of fishing around. Afterward, the nurse explained to me that the stent device curls and if it curls the "wrong way" - whatever that means - it's harder to grasp and extract. It took a while, but it eventually got removed. I didn't watch.
I was a lot wobbly afterward - technically I could have driven myself home but fortunately had Thing 1 to drive me. I passed out for a couple hours once home and felt better after that. Today is better still - the first time in months I haven't had a gremlin actively tapping (or worse) my testicles.
The urologist was emphatic about not wanting to see me for six months, at which point we'll do a kidney ultrasound to see how things look. The definitive diagnostic tool is still a CT scan, but that's a lot of radiation to get on a regular basis so we'll go with something milder unless there's evidence of another stone.
Which there should not be, if I do things the right way, about which more in the next medical post.
