improved catheter

[spencoid2]

I have been having great difficulty urinating and most recently it has become scary. I live in the middle of nowhere, a trip to a competent hospital is 2 hours and a good one with a urologist on-call is 3 hours (if we drive the Rover without regard for speed limits) So it can be very scary to have retention and no way to pee.

I have tried every available catheter but I have a pretty severe bladder neck contracture that catheters will not pass. I recently tried to get samples of a tapered tip cath that might work but the bureaucracy involved has this stalled indefinitely and it will probably not work anyway.

So i decided to try another approach to stiffening a catheter with a wire. Previously I used a stainless steel wire made for guiding catheters, inserting it into the cath. The problem is that the cath bunches up when it encounters the restriction of the bladder sphincter which is very tight. This never worked very well adding just a little but of stiffness.

The new approach involves inserting the cath until it encounters the bladder neck and then inserting a fairly stiff wire which follows the cath easily. Then I apply greater pressure and voila it works, it goes through the bladder neck. The wire is a .040" diameter piano wire probably taken from a piano that i trashed. The wire does not need to be sterile because it is in the catheter and there is always 0 to + pressure so nothing should get from the inside of the cath out.

It is difficult to describe how much relief this has given me.

Also for those in the boonies who can not dash to town for urinalanysis each time a UTI is suspected, I have assembled my own at home urinalysis "lab". First I got dip strips made by Roche that test 7 different levels and although dip tests are not that reliable the Roche is probably the best.

I also resurrected an old microscope and centrifuge that I bought many years ago. The cent is the typical benchtop lab thing that can be found surplus or on ebay. The microscope is a phase contrast which makes translucent items more easy to see but I also got the stain that is used for this sort of testing. I have not used the stain yet but it is supposed to stain the nuclei of lymphocytes to make them easy to identify. Also stains all sorts of other things that you want to see in urinalysis.

I also got the special slides that have a built in cover glass and grid lines for counting. I don't really need to do a qualitative analysis of cell counts but the grids make it much easier for an amateur microscope user to get the magnification right etc.

So, now I feel a lot more comfortable staying in my remote mountain location for as long as possible. I hope that the side effects of ADT do not increase much more as I am losing strength more and more and am afraid I might not be able to do the many physical tasks needed to stay here.

Santa brought an E bike which was just in time because I can no longer make it up my very steep driveway on my fancy hand built mountain bike. The e bike makes it possible. Pretty much every one of my many doctors has stressed the need for regular cardiovascular exercise while on ADT.

[Spyder54]

Great info thanks. The human mind always finds a way and gets creative. I have had 2 ER visits for bladder clotting in the past. I have also learned thru Moffitt, Mayo, and MD Anderson that bike rides of longer than 30 min will cause a rise in any PSA Readings within 24hrs (for those of us with Prostates). Just an fyi.

[spencoid2 in reply to Spyder54]

is that true even with a completely irradiated prostate? i ride my bike all the time especially now that i have an ebike. i should try to avoid biking before my next test. i am really hoping my psa goes down.

[Magnus1964]

I had difficulty with catheterization. I now use a Rusch red tip catheter They are made of stiff plastic with a red tapered tip. They work well.

[spencoid2 in reply to Magnus1964]

where can you get the rush cath? i have been fighting with comfort medical for over a week to get a sampole of something that will probably not work. i know i need a stiff cath and a tapered tip would be great but comfort which owns coloplast and really only wants to sell their stuff is not being very helpful.

[Magnus1964 in reply to spencoid2]

Here are some links to order the Rusch chatheters:

***links removed by HU***

I don't know what size you need, I use a Fr 16, orange tip.

[spencoid2 in reply to Magnus1964]

i can not find them and the power is oing off in a few minutes so it would be great to have a link. i sort of found that liberator medical might have them but have not found a picture or description.

[Dont08759]

Wow, I hate giving medical advice.... for 41 years, as a research surgical tech I threw away thousands of catheter guide wires that I suspect would be better than piano wire (does your urologist know you are using piano wire?). I too had to catheterize myself with red rubber cath. These guide wires have a stainless steel coil around the wire and only the tip is flexible....

[Dont08759 in reply to Dont08759]

Google.....

Merit Medical G03332 Hydrophilic Guide Wire (X)

[spencoid2 in reply to Dont08759]

those are not for self use. you have to carefully insert the wire and use it to guide a catheter after the wire is in. that requires a sterile wire each time and the chance of a false passage is high unless you know what you are doing. these are actually the wires i bought but i put them inside the catheter. they were not stiff enough.

[spencoid2 in reply to Dont08759]

i found the rusch tieman tipped cath and hope to be able to get it. i prefer to not use a wire but after figuring out the right stiffness and insertion order it works great (well almost great)

[larry_dammit]

Wow. I feel the need 😖😖. My urologist put me on catheters so I could empty my bladder, then took me off the flow max. Wrong 😖😖😖. The results were that it shrank the opening to my bladder so I had a similar reaction. I had to restart the flomax to be comfortable using the catheters.

For every action there’s a reaction 😡😡😡 keep up the fight warrior 🙏🙏

[middlejoel]

Have not had to use a catheter yet. Doc put me on Flomax and seems to be working so far. spencoid, where your bladder issues caused by ADT?