Before anyone even asks, I have full permission to talk about this stuff. Bathroom stuff doesn’t need to be taboo. Brady is not concerned about hiding this information from others, but we’d far rather normalize it a little. We all pee, right? Or at least we’d all like to! Some of that stuff isn’t the same for everyone, and we’re going to share what we’ve learned with the rest of the world!
It was about a year after Brady’s surgery when we realized something was up with Brady’s bladder. To be honest, we were just so grateful he still had control of his bathroom stuff, and we didn’t expect it to be perfect, so we didn’t question the new little quirks that came with it.
For instance, Brady peed a lot. Like all the time. Some days, it felt like he lived in the bathroom. But if you remember waaaaay back in the beginning, one of his issues was that he couldn’t really initiate peeing when he wanted to. Those muscles wouldn’t do what he asked of them. With his paraplegia came further change, where the sliding scale of “how badly do I have to pee” was gone. He either didn’t have to pee at all, or he had to pee NOW. And obviously, the ability to hold it was unpredictable. It felt a bit like peepee roulette.
This is something I witnessed a lot of, but Brady didn’t really realize the extent of it until he had a job, and was on the clock a bit more. At work, he was noticing he needed a 10 ish minute long bathroom break every hour, maybe every hour and a half. I remember the day he came home and said “Do you know how much time I spend in the bathroom??” And I laughed, because yes. Yes I did.
Brady was finally able to see a new physiatrist this summer, and that opened up SO many doors of information and help!! The same physiatrist who did Brady’s botox injections 🙂 He knows a lot of stuff. Anyway, he offered a very clear description of what Brady is experiencing – a spastic bladder!
A spastic, or neurogenic, bladder is a condition that comes from Brady’s nerve damage. It leaves him with an increased feeling of needing to pee, even when his bladder isn’t full.
Bladder lesson!!!
We all have a bladder wall muscle. It covers the outside of the bladder, and when it contracts, it squeezes the bladder and helps empty the urine. When its not contracting, the bladder can fill normally. Simple enough, right? Then there are also sphincter muscles that regulate when urine is allowed to leave. Again, that all makes sense. Thanks to nerve damage that is very common with all levels of paralysis, it is just not that simple for Brady anymore. Rather, more often than not, all of those muscles would go at once. So the wall muscles would be squeezing the bladder, but the sphincter muscles would be keeping it all closed up. Picturing squeezing a water balloon. That was Brady’s bladder. Until they would all let go, and Brady would be left in an urgent position. This is incredibly limiting, restricting, unpredictable, and it just plain sucked for him to try and do normal life things. No “pee before we leave” for that guy. He just had to hope for the best. That sucked.
However, having that information was really helpful. It means a lot to have things explained so clearly, doesn’t it?
This issue being prevalent and untreated indefinitely ramps up other health risks, like UTIs and kidney stones, to name a few of the simple ones. As a wheelchair user, Brady already is at a higher risk of those things, and a spastic bladder only makes it worse.
While this cannot be cured, specifically, it can be managed with medications. Brady’s physiatrist said it would be easily done through our family doctor, so yet another thing got added to Dr. Guselle’s list, which she happily took on!
Brady began a medication very slowly a little while ago. It was meant to relax the bladder muscles as a whole. There was fear there, for sure, of things relaxing too much, but we were reassured it would be a very gentle start, and that any and all changes would be made incredibly gradually. This is a commonly used treatment, so everyone was very relaxed about it.
It was legitimately the day Brady started the new medication that he saw change. He decided to go try to pee while he was at work. He didn’t have to go, but he tried to go. And he could! Just a little bit, but his muscles cooperated more than they had in the last year! He had SO much hope, as did I!!
This has become quite a long blog, so I’ll fast forward. Three weeks later, he was at three small doses of this medication per day, and he has found the sweet spot! The man can pee when he needs to, and if its not an appropriate time to break for the bathroom, he has a bit more confidence to hold it for a little while. Of course no one would ever deny him a bathroom break. Zero percent. But he is an incredibly hard worker and likes to finish his stuff up before he takes any kind of break. So this has freed him right up, and he is a WAY happier man! Sure, sometimes it still takes some time to get things rolling, but it is SO much more manageable!
The more you know, right? My goal is NOT to humiliate my husband, but to inform and take some of the weirdness out of the conversation. We all pee, right? So does Brady. It’s just a bit trickier, and whether you’re reading this to learn, or just out of morbid curiosity, please follow along!! You NEVER know when you may encounter something or someone in this boat! Learn learn learn!!
Brady has gone from a catheter to a bed urinal to a commode chair to a toilet to meds and normalcy! We have no idea where he’ll be next, or what will happen in our future, but we’ve learned a lot, and that takes SO much of the fear away!
Thank you, Brady, for being brave and humble enough to tell the internet about your spaz of a bladder. I am incredibly proud of you, and I’m happy you are a free pee-er!