Biopsy day +1

I had intended to go into work on Friday, July 13, but I felt so bad for having more or less ignored M the day before in favor of cooking–dealing in my own way with my stress and fear–that I had decided Thursday night that I would tell my boss I was working from home on Friday.

There is such a conflict that happens. I want to be at home, I feel like I NEED to be at home, but there’s a lot happening at work, and my team is short-staffed, and our whole leadership team in our company has turned over, so I’ve got relationships to build and work to do to prove myself…I feel like I NEED to be at work, too.

By Friday morning, I was so stressed out about the prospect of staying home that in my mind, I’d made a compromise: go to the office in the morning, make an appearance, ensure everything is moving forward, then take off after lunch to spend the afternoon with my husband.

I got out of bed, got ready for work. M got up to use the restroom (we have separate bathrooms, it just works better that way) and passed by me in the kitchen on the way. He was in the bathroom for a long time, way longer than normal. After a while, I heard him calling for me. I went to the door of his bathroom.

“I need you to call the number they gave us yesterday,” he said. “I can’t pee.”

I called the number they’d given us at the surgery center and told the phone-answering lady what was going on. She asked if we could be there to see Dr. G before 9:30. I told her we could.

M and I got dressed and got in the car. The look on M’s face was a mix of worry bordering on fear, and extreme discomfort. My own heart was racing. Turns out, Dr. G normally offices out of Stone Oak, which is much closer to us than the office where Dr. H is, so that was positive. But due to traffic, Google had us take the back roads to get there. I had no idea there were so many bumps and potholes on those roads until we took that drive. God damn, San Antonio, fix the fucking roads! I did everything I could to avoid jarring M–between a full bladder and the pain he already was in–but it was impossible not to hit a few bumps, and he winced every time.

I dropped him at the door of the urology center and tried to find a parking spot. Pause here. I really would like for someone to explain to me the logic behind “Compact Only” parking spaces. NO ONE DRIVES A CAR THAT SMALL! It felt like it took all of eternity to find a spot, but eventually I did. The whole time I was practically breathless.

Once inside, it took about 10 minutes to be called back to the examining room. Did you know they make a handheld ultrasound wand that can detect how full your bladder is? Well, they do, and the nurse ran it across M.’s belly and pronounced his bladder full.

The nurse went out and Dr. G popped in right after that. There would be a catheter involved. I have no idea what else he said.

We had to move exam rooms. A different nurse came into that room. I remember that she was pretty in a scary way and that she had full-blown, drawn-on chola eyebrows. She had M take off his shorts and underwear and lay back on the examining table. She started pulling supplies out of cabinets: an empty, hospital pink container, a big bottle of saline solution, other stuff. The piece de resistance, though, was a clear plastic tube that seemed much longer and thicker than it should have been for what I assumed it was about to be used for.

If you are ever offered a front row seat for watching an unsedated man have a catheter inserted, opt out. If you are ever an unsedated man having a catheter inserted, try not to be that man.

The exam room we were in was the one closest to the waiting room. There was a standing lamp with an extension arm on one side of the exam table, and a hand rail on the other side. M grabbed both violently and howled as the nurse began inserting the catheter. If I’d have been a patient in the waiting room, I’d have said, “Fuck this” and cleared out the second I heard the racket coming from our exam room.

The nurse paused for a moment, M asked if it was in. “No, I still have to get past the prostate,” she said.

“Oh, fuck,” M said and laughed the way you laugh when something’s not funny at all. He gathered himself.

“Okay,” he said, “let’s do this.”

I got up from the chair I’d been squirming in, and came to M’s side. I tried to get him to hold my hand and squeeze it instead of the lamp. Lamp won out.

She finally got the catheter all the way into the bladder, and then slowly but steadily, the pee drained out. I couldn’t see at this point, since I was facing M and had my back slightly turned away from the nurse and this whole draining procedure. The nurse commented idly on the volume of urine. There was a lot. She got another container.

At some point I turned around and looked. The urine was the color of red wine, and not like a happy, light pinot noir, but instead heavy and dark.

After all the urine had finally drained out, the nurse began the process of irrigating the bladder. I don’t know if anyone ever straight up said, “M, you couldn’t pee because of blood clots in your bladder,” but it was pretty clear that’s what the problem was. So rinsing out the bladder was the logical step to take to ensure all the clots got cleared out.

Irrigating the bladder involves using a syringe to pump saline water back up the catheter and into the bladder, and then drawing it all back out. I don’t know how many times the nurse did this, but several for sure. Each time she’d push the saline up into M’s bladder, you could see M’s discomfort.  I asked if he was okay, he said it just made him feel like he needed to pee again. Logical.

I don’t know at what point these medical exam situations cross the line from awkward to ridiculous, and then cross another line to sort of the mundane equivalent of standing in line with strangers at the post office and talking about the weather. But at some point during the irrigation process, I asked the nurse, “So, how long have you been in this field?” Turns out, over ten years, but she’d started as an ER nurse. She’d pretty much seen it all.

At one point M said, “I always thought I’d enjoy my first threesome.” We all laughed.

The nurse finished up, and gave M a container she told him to pee into. As he got off the exam table, I offered him his shorts and underwear to put back on.

“I think we’re past that,” he quipped.

The nurse stepped out. He peed into the container she’d given him. I looked away, but when he finished, he showed me the contents of the container. Clear enough pee, but a bunch of blood clots resting at the bottom. “Damn,” was all could say.

We left after that, with instructions to stay hydrated and take it easy. Nothing else happened that day, other than M’s dick hurt, because, duh. Hell, my dick hurt, and I don’t even have one. One long-running outcome of the day did occur, and it stuck around for many weeks. M refused to take any painkillers. The night after the biopsy, he’d taken a Tylenol 3. Normally M would get up several times a night to pee, but he didn’t do so that night, after he’d taken the pain meds. His theory was that, because he didn’t keep peeing and in doing so, keep clearing his urethra of blood clots, he developed a clot too large to pass. So, even though his body is in pain, he doesn’t want to take anything that will relax him too much and let him sleep too long. I don’t blame him, I think we were both traumatized a little by that visit to the doctor, but the pain he’s in…