Making decisions and removing your catheter

Any decision that anyone makes about cancer treatment is incredibly personal. Every situation is unique.

When I decided to have my prostate removed at the age of 42 I had to consider some definite consequences.

Number one would be that my natural reproductive life would be over. If Mary and I wanted to have another child we would have to use artificial insemination.

On the one hand, that is kind of devastating, but on the other it is kind of reassuring.

It does put your future reproductive life in the hands of technicians, but it also gives you a sense of immortality – as long as the storage company doesn't suffer a catastrophic power failure or you credit card gets turned down.

Also, the doctors warned me that it would be more than a year before I would be capable of an erection and much longer before that particular function would ever return to normal.

The unabashed truth is that it never returns to normal – More on that much later.

At the time that I made my decision, alternative treatments offered at best 12 to 15 years before a likely recurrence of the cancer.

If I were 70 my decision would have been much different – I think. The conventional wisdom at that age would be to take radiation treatment or freezing and hope that something else kills you before the cancer comes back.

I was, and am, planning on getting well past 67 – so surgery was kind of a no-brainer.

I have since read about and met several people who chose alternative treatments.

Some chose the alternatives simply because they were afraid of the surgery and the consequences.

Living with a catheter for three weeks or so, facing an extreme sex-life challenge, fear of incontinence and the pain and discomfort of major abdominal surgery are very real things to think about – but for me I believe it was worth it.

It also wasn't that bad. I have learned that you can adjust to just about anything.

I got pretty good at changing from my bedside catheter bag to the one that strapped to my thigh for traveling and visiting.

I went to Thanksgiving dinner at a friend’s house with about 15 other people with the bag strapped to my thigh and had no problems.

I went for walks in the neighborhood and horsed around with my one-year-old daughter.

I do have to admit that the removal of the catheter was something that I will remember always.

I was on a table in the urologist's office. There was an opening in the table between my legs.

The catheter, of course, is a thin tube threaded up your penis into your bladder, there it is held in place by a little balloon and some stitches that go up to a button on your belly (yes a real button – like you might have on a cardigan sweater.)

I am not sure if the button was unique to my guy – but I still have it somewhere.

"You are going to feel a little pull and then it is going to sting for a minute or so," he said and then pulled the tube out.

It didn't take very long and didn't hurt at all, at first.

He jammed all the stuff into the hole in the table and then headed for the door.

"Someone will be in to help you in a minute," he said and dashed into the hallway.

"It doesn't hurt that …." I started to say and then sat straight up in with an incredible burning feeling. I chewed on the heel of my hand while my eyes filled with water.

Soon the patient assistant – the same guy who had helped me through all my biopsies came in the room.

The pain actually lasted for exactly a minute and then diminished completely. A later "scoping" of my urethra was much worse.

He helped me sit up on the table and then noticed what I was wearing (navy blue sweat pants).

"It is so smart to wear dark pants," he said. "You would not believe how many old men come in here wearing khakis!"

He laughed and then praised me again when I showed him the infant diaper I had brought.

"That's perfect," he said. "You don't need nothing fancy, but you do need something."

The infant diaper was left over from Lucy when she graduated to bigger wrappings.

I fits right over all your stuff and is held in place by your pants. You don't have to worry about losing an entire bladder load, you just have to protect yourself from a little seepage.