Peeing, Part 1

One of the wonderful things about ones own blog is that one can put anything out there, and readers are at their peril.

This tale begins many years ago, when I began having dreams about peeing. No, I didn't wet the bed as an adult (well, there was the one time after dozens of beers, and I'm not really sure but I was still on the floor and the carpet was...) but I would dream about things going on all around me, about buildings falling apart, about places flooding, and I was standing, peeing, and i couldn't do anything about whatever was happening until I finished peeing, and I would never finish peeing.

If you saw the Lord of the Rings first movie and remember the part when they went through the Mines of Moria, with the rotten tunnels and collapsing staircases, I had a dream which put me in a place like that - years before the movie - and things were collapsing like that, and I was peeing at some restroom at the top of one of those staircases, and I couldn't leave until I was done...

At any rate, about seven years ago, I was about to have my first colonoscopy (last mention of that end) when I came up with a major peeing issue. It was diagnosed as an infection, and was treated for a week, and things went on. There had been some decline in pee volume for a few years before that, but this caught my attention.

Over the past years, I have asked my GP about the peeing thing. We have tried Flomax, a prescription drug which is supposed to help relax certain muscles involved with the prostate and peeing. We have tried Avodart, which is supposed to help to shrink an enlarged prostate. The GP kept trying to describe my prostate in "don't worry" terms such as "enlarged," "big," and "let me see if I can figure out how big this thing is," the last of which is of no comfort when his finger is up my ass.

My father used to tell the story of his first prostate exam. "Let's see... he told me to bend over the edge of the table... I heard the snap of the rubber gloves... he put one hand on my shoulder to brace me up... he put the other hand on my shoulder to brace me up... ... ... why, that dirty son of a..."

This fall, when it was clear that neither of the prescription drugs was doing anything in particular to relieve my urinary distress ( slow stream, difficulty starting, difficulty maintaining, waking up a lot in the night, etc.), we decided on a referral to a urologist.