post surgery questions

[wentzel]

I am just curious about the after surgery treatment. I know I will have a cystoscopy and I have seen some posts here or somewhere else about that. I am wondering about the numbing as I have seen comments about it? How is it done, and how painful is it? I am two weeks away from surgery and to be honest really starting to get nervous as hell. I had a urethrotomy several years back and they did a scope while I was asleep.

I don’t like surprises and there more I can educate myself the better I can be prepared.

Any information about the after stuff is helpful.

thanks!
greg

[Clayton]

I haven’t actually had my surgery yet, that happens on the 31st, but I did have a cystoscopy a few weeks ago so that my surgeon could make sure the rest of my urethra looked okay. It wasn’t exactly fun, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought. I didn’t actually feel much to tell the truth. The scope has water flowing out of the tip, so it opens the urethra up, that way the scope itself hardly touches your urethra. When they do the post-op test, they don’t go into the bladder, which is normally the uncomfortable part of it. They’re only interested in the area of the stricture. I hope everything goes well for you. I know what you mean about nerves, mine are really ramping up too.

[poortonykrause]

The post-surgery cystoscopy is nothing. I was worried about it too but honestly you don’t feel anything at all. One thing that was surprising for me, however, is that you will see a lot of scar tissue — I didn’t realize that the surgery basically entails replacing scar tissue with more scar tissue, only such that it will be wide enough for urine to pass through. We’re all walking around with little tunnels built into our urethras.

[wentzel]

I saw something about numbing and that worried me. I really don’t like needles and unfortunately with all the issues the stricture has caused (UTI’s, massive ammonia overload and being in a medical coma for 5 days etc) there have been a bunch. They did an Xray of my urethra, and they forced radioactive fluid inside of me to visualize the stricture. That was unpleasant to say the least and was fairly painful.

It has to be done, but I am certainly nervous to say the least. If I know what to expect I try to be ready.

Best wishes to all and thanks. More questions later!

greg

[Clayton]

The numbing they do is simply a lidocaine gel that they coat the scope with, so there’s no needles involved. In my case the cystoscopy was much less painful than the urethrogram x-ray. It’s not something I would look forward to, but not really something I would dread either.

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