deeply, deeply odd

The title for this post came from the recurring phrase I used last week when having my first go at Intermittent Self Catheterisation (ISC).

And it really was. And continues to be so. In abstract, the idea that something THAT long (40cm - that’s FORTY CENTIMETRES) is going into an aperture which has been, up until this point, a strictly ONE WAY deal still boggles the mind.

Men have the advantage that they only have a single point of entry which is visible externally. Women have two possibles, and they have to locate the correct path blind.

Is it helping? Hard to say. I still don't think I'm doing it entirely correctly every time, plus I don't think I fully trust it yet. But it's pretty weird when I see the amounts which have come out when previously I would have said that I was empty.

This is all TMI but I guess the point of putting this out there is to let people know that it's really not that scary.

And like everything to do with this bizarro disease, I should say that this is not necessarily the way it's going to go for every person with MS - maybe I could've avoided this by committing more to my Bladder Retraining Programme or by not going down the whole bladder-controlling medication route. Who knows.

But if it works and is as life-enhancing / changing as it seems like it could be, then it will be worth a few minutes of weirdness.

[A few days after writing all of the above]

I’ve now been doing this a couple of times a day for around a week and it’s one of the truisms of life with MS (or any kind of lifelong condition and/or situation), but it’s amazing how quickly humans can adapt.

I don’t think I’ve necessarily got it all down - if I step outside myself and think about it too much, it IS still a bit weird. But aside from a tiny micro-moment of discomfort and some logistical issues (how to fit it into ‘normal’ life, how to coordinate / juggle all the required elements), it’s getting easier.

As I said above, bladder issues can be a common aspect of living with MS but it doesn’t necessarily follow that you’ll one day find yourself sticking a tube down your dinkle / up your la la.

(As an aside, because ‘la la’ is the chosen gynaecological euphemism in our house, Little Miss D thought that when we went to see the new Ryan Gosling / Emma Stone film it was all about lady parts)
 
And anyway, nothing can be as weird as what went down in Washington a few days ago! Oy.