In and Out

Warning: the blog post to follow talks about quite indelicate matters

      While I’ve been blessed with a pretty healthy life, when I did have problems, they mostly pertained to intake, with ulcers the main candidate, putting constraints on what I could eat and drink. My problems in old age are of the opposite kind: outtake, to use a polite word. There are two loci here: liquids come out in front and solids come out in the rear. I have problems with both and I don’t know how much they are a function of my advanced age. I leave research to a younger generation.

  The front I turn to first, which it also did temporally. A few years ago, my bladder went on strike and stopped functioning. Not good! The first remedial action was to have me insert you know where— with considerable frequency—a tube that would facilitate things to flow in a more or less normal fashion. It worked for a while, but not for all that long.

   The next move was more drastic, but it has been most successful—at least so far, he said cautiously. I hole was “drilled”—with appropriate local anesthesia—just above the pubic bone straight to the bladder, bypassing the long route via the penis. That has worked well so far and, I hope, will for the short number of years, if any, that may be left to me. The system requires me to strap a bag onto my leg that I need to empty about five times in a 24 hour period, requiring me to get up twice a night, on the average. I also need to visit the urologist every three weeks to check on things and renew all the equipment. The sole virtue of this malarkey is that it works.

   The problem in the rear that started only very recently affects my behavior much more seriously and remains unsolved. Its dual characteristics are seriously annoying and are ongoing. I have very frequent urges to defecate that cannot be controlled by my muscles. At this point the unhappy but  effective but sole solution is an adult diaper. The second symptom consists of frequent jabs of a sharp pain, resembling the stabbing of a knife. So far the recommendations of the proctologist I have consulted a couple of days ago have not solved either problem. I remain hopeful—do I have a choice?—but I am confined to the house for however long these symptoms last; they are both active as I now sit at my desk to type this blog post.