Just Another Thursday Morning

There are some mornings when you wake up and wonder quite how your life got to this point.

This was one of them.

I’m lying on the bed in the cabin, wearing nothing more sophisticated than my underpants, drinking coffee and watching a plastic bag attached to my leg. The bag is connected to a tube, the tube is connected to a catheter, and the catheter is connected to a prostate problem that has somehow taken over a sizeable part of my life.

Just another Thursday morning.

Except that the catheter isn’t flowing.

I’ve learned to know this particular catheter rather well. I know what it looks like when it’s flowing. I know the little bit of movement in the tubing. I know the warmth when urine passes through it. I know that there should normally be a little dribble in the bottom of the bag.

And I know what it looks like when there is nothing.

Nothing is considerably less reassuring.

The problem is that I have already experienced what a complete blockage feels like. It isn’t a minor inconvenience. It is an intensely painful experience, made considerably worse by the knowledge that the thing attached to you which is supposed to provide the escape route has apparently decided to stop working.

So I watch.

I wait.

I calculate.

I wonder whether I should use another Uro-Tainer. I wonder whether I should stay at the caravan rather than walk down to the café with Cora. I think about whether Susan might be able to pick me up when she comes home. I think about how many Uro-Tainers I have left and how many more are on their way.

This is not how I imagined spending my retirement.

Eventually I use the saline. Some goes through. Then some comes back. Then debris starts appearing.

And then the urine starts coming.

More comes.

And more.

Suddenly the bag is filling, and the thing that had been frightening me a short while earlier is doing exactly what it is supposed to do.

That’s the strange thing about living with a catheter. You can become enormously grateful for something that, six months ago, you would never have given a second thought.

Going for a wee used to be something a human simply did.

You felt the need, you went to the toilet, you emptied your bladder and carried on with your day.

Now I have equipment.

I have bags.

I have spare bags.

I have Uro-Tainers.

I have a grab bag for emergencies.

I have learned to watch the tubing.

I have learned that sitting in a car park with a blocked catheter is not something I particularly want to repeat.

And somewhere in the middle of all this, there is a man trying to maintain some sort of ordinary life.

So perhaps that is why the old toilet joke came back to me:

Here I sit, broken-hearted,
Paid two pence and only farted.

Fifty years ago, two pence would get you into a public toilet.

Today, I seem to have progressed to carrying my own toilet system around with me.

There is something almost beautifully ridiculous about that.

And underneath all the medical terminology, the appointments, the prostate, the catheter, the bags and the impending HoLEP, there remains one undeniable fact:

Shit is the thing humans make.

We make it. We dispose of it. We build entire systems around it. We joke about it because, frankly, what else can you do?

And sometimes life becomes so complicated that the most sensible response is to recognise the absurdity of it all.

So here I am.

Thursday morning.

Cora is keeping watch at the window. The coffee is going down nicely. The catheter has eventually decided to cooperate. Susan is out for the morning. The district nurse is due to look at the problem tomorrow.

And I’m still here.

Just another Thursday morning.