Denali by Ben Moon

Denali by Ben Moon

Author:Ben Moon
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2020-01-13T16:00:00+00:00


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Initially, I hardly had the strength to sit upright, and Shawndi, a friend who was also a physical therapist from another department in the hospital, began to visit me a couple of times a day to help me sit, then stand, and then take a few hesitant steps. A few days later, I finally was able to complete one full lap around the halls of my hospital floor. I gave her a big hug and told her, “I think I can get through this, thank you so much, Shawndi.”

Toward the end of my hospital stay, I mysteriously lost my ability to urinate. I wheeled my IV stand to the bathroom and stood unsteadily at the toilet, holding one hand under warm water in the sink and the other in the hot shower, staring down at my stubborn penis. I verbally entreated my bladder to release its voluminous contents.

As I visualized waterfalls and flowing rivers, I finally pushed my call button and begged the nurse for a catheter. I watched in horror as she lubed the end of the sixteen-inch tube and then slid it into the tip of my penis, up my urethra, until it reached my stretched bladder and the urine began to flow. My discomfort shifted to sweet relief as the pressure diminished. My odd moment of ecstasy was interrupted as the nurse exclaimed, “Oh my,” as she carefully handled the receptacle that nearly overflowed with two liters of my piss.

Her face deadpan, the nurse joked, “Wow, you really had to go.”

“I wasn’t joking,” I retorted. “Do you think I would ask for a catheter unless I was absolutely desperate?”

Never in my life had I experienced such odd discomfort and desperation as when I was unable to empty a full bladder.

Due to my inability to urinate, Dr. Higgins recommended I take another trip into the impersonal cylinder of the CT scanner. As I emerged from the test, he told me the scan had shown that an infected abscess had taken over the void left by the removal of my rectum, putting pressure on the nerves that controlled my bladder function.

A procedure was arranged to insert a Jackson-Pratt (JP) drain into the infected surgical site. A JP drain is essentially plastic tubing that pulls fluid from the problem area and into a grenade-shaped bulb that is squeezed before insertion to form a suction, keeping the wound site dry to combat infection.

A week later, I had worked back up to walking laps around the hospital floors, and with the infection seemingly under control, my doctors released me to go home. I was ecstatic. Looking at Denali, I said, “Hey, Nali, where do you want to go hike?” I just wanted to breathe fresh air and be anywhere other than the antiseptic institutional hallways from the past couple of weeks.



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