To Pee or Not To Pee

  

Turning over in his grave.



Frederic Foley

 A few years ago I had some minor surgery done. It was on an outpatient basis and I was discharged directly from the recovery room soon after the anaesthesia wore off. I went home relatively happy. Then when I got home and realized wife #2 wasn't home, I was downright ecstatic. I just kind of lolled around the apartment, watching TV and having a grand old time. Oh, and learning Mesilas Yeshorim*, too. And I have a bridge to sell you. After a while I had a slight urge to relieve myself, um, urologically. I waited a while (till the commercial) and went to do my thing. Nothing. Pushed a little harder. Still nothing. By now the slight urge was no longer slight. I will not bore you with the gory details. Suffice it to say I was back in Maimonides that night, having a large, black amazon of a nurse introduce me to my first experience with a Foley catheter. Invented in 1935 by Dr. Frederic Foley, a urologist, it is basically a tube with a balloon on the end that is inserted into one's whatchamacallit to drain his bladder. Anyway, back to the nurse. Her hands should fall off! I've gone through painful procedures before. I would have preferred root canal (perhaps without anaesthesia) to the way she manhandled me. Poor choice of words, but you get the idea. Again, I won't share the details, but I made up my mind that if anyone every wants to do that to me again while I'm conscious, they're going to lose an extremity or two. Now let's fast forward to me waking up from my induced slumber at Columbia Presbyterian. I had a bag of urine hanging at the side of my bed. That meant that I had a Foley. Taking it out hadn't been nearly as bad as putting it in, so I wasn't too upset. So a few weeks later the time came to yank it out. Afterward, I was supposed to be able to pee. Uh-uh. Not so fast, Kimosabe. Couldn't do it. They gave me Flomax. Nope. They gave me Hytrin. Nada. They gave me Proscar. Nein. I was as dry as the Sahara at noon. Not the Mojave, because I've already used that in a previous post, and no, let's not have another contest because I don't remember which post and I'm too lazy to try and find it now. So they decided to put the Foley back in. I told the nurse that if she hurts me I will find her and her family and force them all to listen to Celine Dion for twenty-four hours. Then she did a remarkable thing: she put it back in and didn't really hurt me much at all. Obviously it's never going to be my favorite way to spend time with a young lady, but it wasn't nearly as terrible as I remembered. Columbia was discharging me soon so they decided to leave it in and let Silver Lake deal with my urological issues. At Silver Lake they tried something new to stimulate urination. It's called a straight cath. What they do is insert the damn thing and then pull it right out again. Why this is supposed to work, I have no idea. Well, it didn't. Back to the proverbial drawing board. Stuck the Foley back in for a few days and bombarded me with everything they had: Flomax. Hytrin. Proscar. Stuck my finger in a cup of warm water (I made that one up). When they finally took it out again, I went to the bathroom and tried to relax, to clear my mind and consequently my bladder. YES! Success! There'a a scene in the movie "The Green Mile" where prison guard Tom Hanks is urinating for the first time since a prisoner with magical healing powers cured his urological tract infection. When the stream starts and there's no pain, a look of absolute ecstasy washes over his face; the man is in heaven. That's pretty much how I felt. Proud, too. After all, I had peed all by myself! I texted Chayie and the kids: "Stop the presses! I peed!!" What a guy!

PS Check out that picture of the bard. Would someone tell me when he had time to write? Can you imagine how long it took him to get dressed in the morning??

*Mesilas Yeshorim=a scholarly Jewish tome.