Anything retained that should be expelled is an awful feeling – this includes urinary retention. I always feel really bad for elderly people coming in with obvious pain because they haven’t been able to pee for a while. I had just such a gentleman assignment to me. He was 79, could barely speak a word of English and kept clutching his bladder and pointing to his crotch saying, “no pee pee last night”. Oh dear. I got a 16F in him so fast he didn’t realize his pants were off! He drained almost a liter of urine in less than 5 minutes. The relief was literally palpable. By the time the doc got to see him, there was nothing much to do except set up an appointment with a Turkish speaking urologist and write him a script for prophylactic antibiotics. That’s one of the things I love about working in the ER – discharging a happy customer in a (relatively) short amount of time. That and getting a catheter to drain urine without a fuss!
2 comments:
It's a nice thing, your compassion.
Can someone explain why elderly people seem to figure prominently in the "urinary retention" topics? Is it because they don't take care of themselves, get an infection, then a blockage? Or because the nurses at the home don't take care of them?
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