The biggest surprise after surgery was the lack of pain once the anesthesia fully wore off. Initially, I felt a lot of pressure in my bladder like it was at maximum capacity. They gave me a suppository to help calm the spasms it was having.
The reason for the spasms is that removing the prostate involved removing a section of the urethra and part of the bladder. The pelvic floor was lifted to fill the space of the now missing prostate. It is a combination of prostatectomy and bladder reconstruction.
During the healing of my internal rearrangement, I will have a catheter from my bladder down our through my penis that has the end of that tube hooked to some high strength tape with a plastic holder. It has a connector to which a larger “night bag is connected to help one make it through the night. I was sent home with a “leg bag” that straps to the thigh in place of the bigger bag so one can wear pants or hide it under clothing. The part inside the bladder has balloons that inflate to keep it in place with drain holes.
My fear was that the catheter would be immensely uncomfortable. However, once the bladder calmed down sometime overnight the first night after surgery, there was no pain connected with the catheter except in very specific circumstances. Certain movements necessary to shift in bed or get our of bed, or a chair, rub near the tip of the penis and that doesn’t feel good. In my experience, that unpleasantness passes quickly.
It was nice to not have to worry about waking up to pee. The bag is big enough that anyone should be able to sleep the night. However, I slept only an hour or two at a time in the hospital.
I tried chicken noodle soup and crackers for lunch. It tasted good and felt good in my stomach. My surgery took an hour longer than usual because my prostate was twice the size the doctor estimated from a DRE and ultrasound. Yes, my prostate was four times normal size. (No wonder I had difficulty sleeping through the night, and had urgency issues!)
Because of the extra time I was under anesthesia dues to my massive prostate, they decided to keep me for another day. They were waiting for me to have a bowel movement to know that my bowels were waking up. The biggest side affect to general anesthesia and narcotics is that it knocks out your bowels. This is a complication for me, as I was diagnosed in the early 90’s with “spastic colon”, what is more commonly called “irritable bowel syndrome” (IBS). I have another complication in that I broke my back in a car accident in 1992. You don’t realize how many back muscles you use to have a bowel movement until you have a compression fracture in your back. I had been through that before and thought I was ready for it.
Also, in addition to the catheter to the bladder, there is a drain tube to drain off blood and other fluids that accumulate. They give you cumiden, a blood thinner to prevent blood clots from laying in bed, so that made internal cuts take longer to quit bleeding. I also experienced the hole for the drain leaking a couple of times, and they had to keep changing the dressing. So that drain had to stay in another day and that was why they kept me the first extra day.
Overconfident in the minors burps and farts, I elected scrambled eggs and dry toast for breakfast the second day. Even with getting up and walking, my bowels were not completely awake. I ended up vomiting, and that caused me to be kept another day.
My strength went way down after that and my walking was a shuffle, and I couldn’t go as far. The final day I was at a normal pace, didn’t feel weak, and circled the entire ward on two different occasions.
I have 4 or five holes in my abdomen and a rectangle of hair shaved off my abdomen. They inflate your abdomen with air to get a better view. As the air begins to leave your abdomen, it affects your shoulders. For me it was only my right shoulder. It felt like i’d been stabbed in the front of the joint of my right shoulder after the first day. The day after that, the pain was pressure on the back of my right shoulder.
The last night in the hospital I finally slept well. I had a two hour sleep then I think I slept for like 6 hours. I think they woke me up for meds and vitals, but I was in the mood to sleep so it didn’t keep me from getting rest.
I finally got home a little after noon on Monday after arriving at the hospital at 10 am on Friday.
Men's Health in My Perspective 