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Work Report - Mike Crowl focuses on jobs and work and anything connected to the two.
Mike blogs in two places on Orble, and two on Blogger. His wife thinks he writes too much.
When the hospital tells you that walking is good for you after a prostate op, they don't tell you how much you should pace yourself, and that feeling good when you start out walking may not mean you'll still feel good later in the day.
After the 4 km walk yesterday, I went home and had a snooze, as I probably mentioned in yesterday's post. However, when I got up I was feeling stiff in the legs - not surprising, since they've little that can be regarded as energetic for a while - and there were aches and pains around my prostate area that I didn't like.
Didn't sleep well during the night either. I've been tending to get up and go to the loo more than I would have prior to December, when all the catheter issues began, so I guess it's partly just learning to live with my normal self again. But last night was ridiculous. Kept feeling the need to go to loo even when I probably could have managed not to. And things were sorer than they had been for days
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One of the things I've most missed while being fitted with a catheter is being able to walk freely, and at a decent pace. Walking, while thus hampered, has been like trundling along at a really old man's pace, and never comfortable.
Walking comes highly recommended as part of the healing process after the prostate operation, so I'm keen to make sure I get going again. Until today, I've only walked up to the local shop and
St Clair Beach, Dunedin, New Zealand - shot taken by Setev on flickr.com
back to get a newspaper: no great task. And last night, my wife and I went for a fairly brief walk (by my standards) along the Esplanade at St Clair Beach. Though brief, it was satisfying, and I could feel long unused (long in the sense of nearly three months) muscles responding to being needed again.
Today, however, we did a four kilometre walk! The WOW factor was huge for me - though maybe not so much for my wife who's been walking to work regularly for months, and who yesterday got up to something like 15,000 steps on her pedometer
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Hospitals are notorious for being places where you can’t really rest. The daytime is full of people coming and going, which is okay, if you’ve got the energy to cope with them, but when the night time seems to be much the same, and you don’t get the sleep you need, hospital can become something of a nightmare.
The first night I spent there was okay for the most part, even though I was woken a number of times to have my blood pressure taken, as well as my pulse checked and my temperature read. Along with this were the checks on the two IVs I had: one that went into the cannula on my right hand (the anaesthetist had tried the left, got the cannula in and then missed the vein – he said sometimes they move under the pressure of the needle) which I think was a general flushing of the system, and the other that went into an extra tube in my catheter – a larger catheter than the ones I’d been used to wearing: this one had two extra tubes. This IV kept the bladder and such from any blockage. So there was water going in and water coming out on a fairly regular basis.
With all this going on sleep wasn’t easy, but I was fairly relaxed, having felt so good after the operation. Plus I’d slept a bit before the night came: my visitors would suddenly be there and I’d be unaware of them. I woke up to my wife stroking my hand at one point; was awake when my oldest daughter and her tribe arrived, and then woke up suddenly later on when my second daughter turned up and was in the middle of leaving me a message to say she’d been
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Last Monday I had the prostate operation I’ve been waiting on. There was a bit of a delay, because the first op for the day took longer than expected, but I still managed to get in pretty much on time, around 2.30. Not sure how long the operation took, but I think it was about 4.45 by the time I got out.
I opted, after discussion with the anaesthetist, to have an epidural rather than a general anaesthetic. Two or three people during the week before had told me that recovery time was better and that you didn’t have long term after-effects. The anaesthetists agreed, and said that they also give you some medication to make you drowsy, so in fact you’re barely aware of what’s going on. The epidural injection wasn’t much fun, but I had a sore back (having twisted it somewhat a couple of days before) so that may have made it less pleasant. As for being aware: well, I thought I was, but in fact I think I was in some state of being half in a dream and half in reality. I noticed the people around, but didn’t notice the time going past; I was aware of people talking to me occasionally, but probably didn’t respond, and apparently I coughed at one point when the surgeon was looking up my urethra through his camera (or whatever it is) and gave him a bit of a start, but I knew nothing about this. In fact, the operation was a bit of a blur, and when I was wheeled into the recovery room I wasn’t really thinking about it at all.
So yes, epidural definitely was the way to go. I’ll talk further about the couple of days following, in later posts. In the meantime, suffice to say that I’m home (as of yesterday afternoon), there have been no complications (the surgeon and staff were generally well-pleased with things) and I am peeing again! And I have no catheter. Life is good.
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One more sleep till the operation day, and I’m coping, but only just!
It hasn’t helped this week that I’ve had an increasingly twitchy back, which means that if I’m not careful I can suddenly put it out, like I did this morning. Something I really don’t need on top of the operation. I’ve got to lie flat on my back for the day after the op, so that's going to be interesting! At the moment the back's improved, so here’s hoping!
Everyone seems to have a horror story about this operation, or operations in general. And those that don’t tell me all the funny things that could happen, or treat it all with great amusement – something I’ve no doubt done to others in the past. Justice obviously prevails
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Ten weeks today with a catheter, and yesterday another infection, nasty enough to just about disable me at times. Off to the doctor again, and more antibiotics. Life is so rich!
But then, a phone call at work. From the hospital. There’s been a cancellation and we’d like you to come in for a pre-admission. Operation next Monday!
Too shocked yesterday to really take it in, but today I’m feeling better not only because of the antibiotics but because I’ve spent four and half hours in the hospital going through all the rigmarole involved in being pre-admitted
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Haven’t been doing much blogging over the last week. Just haven’t felt like it. It’s the sort of thing that happens every so often. You just feel like you’ve had enough for a while.
Apart from that nothing much has been happening on the prostate front, which is a good thing, in one sense. It’s been a week without too much irritation, thank goodness – and no urinary tract infections. Long may this last!
I finally gave in and rang the Urology Dept yesterday, although I’d got to the point of thinking it wasn’t worth bothering and it would be better just to carry on doing what my wife had recommended: live as though this is how things are going to be, at least for the next month or so
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Last night wasn’t a very good night as far as sleep was concerned – and it wasn’t because I was trying to figure out how to insert the strange phrase ‘sleep number bed’ into a blog post. (See below for an explanation of that peculiar phrase.)
I woke up at one point with the day bag hanging out of the bed because it was semi-full and hadn’t automatically emptied into the night bag, as it should do. The weight of the bag was such that it was pulling on the catheter, and anything that gives the catheter a pull causes an irritation inside the male member. (And I don’t mean the male member of parliament, either.)
My wife informed me, after our visit to the Accident and Emergency Department the other night, that she noticed that the catheter actually has a kind of corrugated surface in part, presumably to ensure it stays in place better. I did not know this before and knowing it now has not made me more friendly towards catheters
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Well, after my concerns about lack of exercise yesterday, I can say that today was an improvement in this regard. During the last week of our holidays, my wife and I spent a good deal of time clearing up the garden, shifting the compost heap from one side of the house to the other, planting vegetable seedlings, cutting back much of the overgrowth of bushes that had occurred over the last year or more. In fact, we’ve cut back so much of this growth that it seems as though there’s far more light around the property now.
Once we were back at work, of course, (entering dates and details into our PDAs, of course) the garden took second place.
However, today, being yet another holiday (Waitangi Day), we got on and sorted out the front path where the rhododendrons and some Chinese bush and various other plants were all competing for space. Not any more. Each one has been trimmed of excess baggage and there is ample space for them all to grow. Some of them look a bit bare, admittedly, but you can’t have everything
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I’m going to have to start taking diet pills by the time I get finished with this prostate and catheter business. I’m sure I’ve put weight on around the stomach; it doesn’t help that I can only walk at a kind of measured pace, as though I had all the time in the world. I can’t run, hop, leap, jump, skip or generally move any faster than your average racing snail.
The only exercise I’ve had over the last few weeks has been the work my wife and I have done in the garden: but even a lot of that was less than energetic – in my normal terms.
Roll on the day when I’m ‘free’ again
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It’s been an interesting few days. After getting off antibiotics for almost a week, I had to go back on them last Friday. That was pretty much expected.
But on Saturday I had a bit of a surprise when I got up. For those who aren’t aware of these things, when you’re wearing a catheter, you have to attach a ‘night bag’ to it when you go to bed. This is because the day bag isn’t big enough for the expected flow during the night.
The surprise was that when I got up, instead of the night bag being fairly full as usual, it was virtually empty. Not a very good sign, but as it happened, I’d only been up for a short while before things started moving in the urine department again
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380 Posts dating from December 2006
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