Peeing, Part 2

The urologist is a smallish fellow, about my age, very tidy (encouraging in a urologist) and given to bowties. "Why are you here?" "I'd like to pee better." "You're in the right place." This was in October (2008).

His first discovery, from a urine sample, was a raging bladder or prostate infection, of unknown duration but possibly laying there for a long time. He put me on a combo drug (antibiotic plus, including sulfa which is mainly used these days for prostate infections) for a month. He told me that prostate infections are very stubborn and notoriously under-treated, which made me think that I might have been harboring this little bugger for maybe years.

After this course of treatment, from which I noticed some small improvement, I went back for an actual exam. This was the day on which things started getting personal and weird. First off, nurses started attending to my penis. One was very nice, and the other quite attractive, but when they told me that the doctor intended to shove a tube up my penis to have a look around in my bladder, and began buttering me up with the local anaesthetic, fear took over.

The doctor inserted the tube, with surprisingly little sensation, and showed me my bladder with a mini camera. We saw bumps where my enlarged prostate was a problem, and we discovered a stone in my bladder, built from various precipitated minerals, of some significant size. We thought the stone was about 5 centimeters (2 inches) long, and it looked to be dark mineral with some funny flaky stuff around it. Yes, I saw this live on a monitor. No, I didn't feel it.

I learned that one of the effects of the enlarged prostate was that my bladder wouldn't completely empty, that this probably contributed to the growth of the stone, and that we needed to take some action to remove these obstacles.

Two surgeries were scheduled: the first, done with a scope up my penis, would blast apart the stone and remove the pieces; the second, after the bleeding settled so the field of vision was clear, and also with a scope up my penis, would use a "green light" laser to fry ("photoselective vaporization") parts of my prostate gland and open the bladder and urethra for easy urine passage. These were to be outpatient surgeries, in that morning, home by afternoon, next day off, etc.