Still waiting for a surgery date

They weren’t kidding when they said I’m low priority, I’m still waiting on a surgery date. So it looks like it definitely won’t be happening in April. May is difficult because I’ve got to travel for a wedding in the middle of the month and the surgeon says I’ll need a couple of weeks after surgery before I’m fit to travel.

That pushes it into late May or early June and if they can’t manage to fit me in then it’s summer holiday season and there’s basically no chance of getting any non-urgent surgery done until late August.

This is starting to get really annoying. I’m kind of scared to plan anything just in case it clashes with surgery but the hospital are really bad at communicating and unwilling to plan more than about a month in advance.

In the meantime I had my suprapubic catheter replaced. I’d previously had a transparent silicone one but the nurse put in one of the brown rubbery ones instead. I don’t seem to get on well with those. It was irritating my skin, making the wound bleed and I was getting a lot more bladder spasms. So I popped up to the hospital the other day and got them to replace it with another transparent one and things seem better now. Of course the nurse did that thing of treating me as if I was making it all up.

I’ve also been using a flip-flow valve with my catheter for the last couple of weeks, to try to remind my bladder of how it feels to fill and empty. At the moment I’ve still got a leg bag attached to it, since when I need to go it’s usually been pretty urgent and I ended up with bladder spasms forcing urine out through my urethra. I’m hoping to eventually change over to not having the bag. One thing I’ve noticed is that it’s really very difficult, when I’m standing at the toilet with the valve open, not to relax my urinary sphincter and let urine out through my urethra. If I do that too often it gets very irritated and painful.