Month: May 2013

Fair warning: this is a blog post about masculinity, aging, self-perception, fear and catheters. It may get uncomfortable. It has been, and still is, for me.
On the day of my one week post-op appointment, when finally I found my way to the radiology clinic there was an elderly woman blocking me. She was standing in a space that was almost but not quite at the reception desk and almost but not quite in the hall. As people squeezed by – ‘C wing, no, you have to access that by the first floor, you can take the blue elevators but not the ones there, you have to go up one floor, straight ahead, then to the left’ – she was turning her head, very slowly, from one direction to the other, a branch caught in a fast-flowing stream. I sympathized. I couldn’t move that quickly myself. “Ma’am? Do you need help?” a nurses’ aid stopped. Another woman slowed, kind eyes on the woman as if she wanted to help, but didn’t know what to do. People started backing up behind us. “I need the…. the…what’s it called again?” the elderly woman said.
Behind the counter, the clerk, standing, had one hand on her hip. She kept looking up, then down at something in front of her, and then up again: “Ma’am, this is the radiology clinic.” Then, more loudly: “Radiology.” Some of the dozens of people slumped in chairs were watching, but most seemed lost in their own thoughts. There are lots of bright and cheery spaces in the Jewish General. Not radiology.
The nurses’ aid reached out and tried to take the elderly woman’s elbow, but after a step or two she shook it off. For a moment then they just remained in place, looking at each other: “Ma’am,” said the nurses’ aid, not unkindly but quite loudly, as if the woman’s problem was deafness instead of confusion. “This is a hospital. Why are you in the hospital? Can you tell me?”
“Sir?” A line of sight had opened. The clerk had forgotten the woman and was looking at me. “You have an appointment?”
I suspect I was a disappointment to the radiology staff. As I lay on my back for the x-rays that would check my plumbing an overly tentative resident, a senior radiologist who swooped in at the last minute and a nurse who actually seemed to be the only one who really knew what was going on poured dyed fluid into a cup connected to a clear plastic tube connected to my bladder. Then the three of them held the funnel high in the air, looking to me for all the world like auto mechanics jointly topping up my oil. Except that I could really feel it when my reservoir was too full. It was the ‘having to go to the washroom so bad you won’t make it’ desperate kind of urgency that, although catheterized in any case and forcing my stomach and legs to stillness, made my feet kick back and forth against the hospital metal. “Tell your surgeon we didn’t get much into you,” said the radiologist, leaving. I could only see his back, “and will somebody get some towels in here?”
When that trial was over I was limping through the labyrinth again, to the surgeon’s office. Despite the fact that lots of people in this world, and I know, lots of people, have had catheters removed, nobody warned me. It certainly was one of the most bracingly gasping few seconds I’ve ever undergone. As the deflated bulb is being pulled down the urethra and out of the body (you thought I was going to say penis, and it would be true, but I’m saving that word), there is a sensation that beggars description. It starts with pain but doesn’t end there.
Being unstapled was easy by comparison. My various abdominal wounds were liberated of foreign metal quickly and without bother, the steel bits clinking as they were dropped into some unseen metal garbage. Perhaps it was that ease that made me overconfident, thinking nothing much more was about to happen.
I shouldn’t complain. If I thought removing a catheter was bad, at least I wasn’t awake when they put it in. And I’m hardly unique. Men in nursing homes routinely have catheters changed. For me, the sharp but quick pain marked a major step back to normal. Or at least, mostly normal.
I hope.
One of my very earliest memories is of a euphemism for urinating properly: it was “good boy”. It must have arisen during the first months of being diaper-free. ‘Did you do good boy?’ my mother would ask my younger brother and me (I suppose I’m conflating these dim memories with photos when I imagine her in a bee-hive hairdo, although it was the 1960s). Maybe she thought the word “pee” was too rough, and “urinate” too technical for our toddler tongues. Maybe it was what we, learning language, naturally enough called a successful visit to the washroom, repeating a mother’s words back to her. I don’t know. However it happened, calling the control of where you point your penis ‘good boy’ probably says a lot about where a male is headed in life.
I remembered that expression when the surgeon sent me home with the words “your only real job for today is to rest and to make sure your bladder is working. Your big job for today is to pee.”
It’s not so much that I’m afraid of being a bad boy. It’s that I’m afraid of losing what it means to be a man. In the dimness of the radiology clinic, thinking about the elderly woman, I realized that I was in some subtle way telling myself that I wasn’t like all these other people. I’m younger. I’m healthier. I’m more aware, more thoughtful, more driven. It was a lie, of course, otherwise why was I there? And the purpose of the lie was to spare myself from fear, the usual post-operative fear that, with a catheter being taken out and a prostate removed, a urethra reconstructed and most – but not all – of my nerves spared, maybe I will never be fully myself again. Whatever exactly “myself” means, a half-century after first being told I was a good boy.