Updating

Last week, I wrote two short posts about my early adventures with self-catheterizing. As I often do, I tried to be humourous. Hopefully, it worked, at least to some degree, for my humour can be very dry and not always obvious.

Now that I've been at this catheter business of self-abuse :-) for more than a week, I am thinking that maybe I should bring us up to date with a little more detail: not about the process, thank goodness, but about the whys and wherefores.

When I went in for my four-month dilation in June, the urologist suggested that we try this procedure. I was startled because I had hardly heard of it before. He explained that it may help to keep me open better and longer. Although I was rather shocked by the suggestion, I also thought that it would be rather nice to at least push the dilation interval back a little. After all, dilation not fun. Neither is self-catheterization fun, but it is bearable once you get the hang of it.

Sometime every morning, I do the deed, and there is not much more to tell. It stings a little but not much, and the process doesn't take long. I insert the tube until I flow, and then I gently pull it out.

We use a new, sealed, catheter every day. Sue has organized a system to keep the process as clean as possible. Although catheterization at home is not considered to be a sterile procedure, we want to get as close to that as possible, for you may recall that last year's surgeries and catheters led to prostatitis that required several bouts of strong antibiotics.

That's pretty well it, but since we're all together in this open and frank place, I shall also say a little something about my rotator cuff issues. I did eventually, have a cortisone shot a few weeks ago. The doctor targetted the most painful spot, a little above the bicep on the outside of my arm. It has worked fairly well. I wouldn't say that it's perfect, but I do appreciate quite a bit of relief. Having that particular area of pain reduced, however, I notice my actual shoulder more. There is kind of a grinding up there, almost like it tends to get stuck a bit. However, it is manageable and better than it was.

So we move along in this petty pace. We are watching a lot of Wimbledon coverage this week. We don't usually watch regular, network tv, preferring to stream specialty channels like Brtibox and Acorn. However, we signed up for the full sports package on TSN for July. Come August, we will have to get SN (sans T) for the Canadian Open. In September we'll go back to TSN for the US Open.