Did you all enjoy new year? I did. I'll even go as far as to say, I well and truly put my recent bladder retaining improvements to the test. Oh yes.
I know quite a few people who have MS and it seems to be quite common that caffeine and alcohol aggravate your bladder. Cue New Year's Eve and plenty of alcohol. By the time I got to bed - half 4 - I had only used the toilet 3 times in 9 drink fuelled hours. I'm happy with that. I can't tell you how much urine I passed each time, but it was more than than my usual 700 mls.
When I first started to self-catheterise, my continence nurse asked if I could measure the volume of fluid that I pass. Therefore I can confirm that when I empty my bladder the jug told me I passed between 400-700 ml. One drunken night I managed to hang on to just over a litre of urine! Bearing in mind the average bladder holds five or six hundred millilitres of fluid, I informed my urology specialist nurse of my 1000 ml Guinness wee. She looked at me, shrugged her shoulders, and said, "So what, I drained 3 litres off an elderly prostrate cancer patient last week?" She insists that's the truth, but I think she was taking the piss.(pun intended)
She also told me that it is estimated thatt 70% of men in their 80s have prostate cancer, so us blokes have plenty of time on the toilet to look forward to. The reason that statistic is so high is that it is a slow developing illness and many men with prostate cancer never have symptoms; they undergo no therapy, and eventually die of other unrelated causes. Older men often die with prostate cancer, not because of it.
Next week, I'll talk about Gilenya.
Dan
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