When I was a girl, around 13 or so, my mum started calling me, half-enviously, half-fondly, ‘The Camel’, due to my ability to retain water. Every Saturday morning we’d go shopping at the Bristol city centre department stores; she’d need the toilet maybe three times, but I wouldn’t need it at all.
‘Have you “been”?’ she’d ask me before we left the house. ‘No!’ I’d snicker, spitefully. When we got home after four hours out, I’d make a point of sprawling on the stairs, chugging Corona cherryade by the gallon and gossiping with a mate for around an hour before I finally ‘made my toilette’. It became part of the war of attrition which is so common between mothers and daughters. Having probably been a bitch even when I was a baby, I had no hesitation in using our differing levels of water retention against the poor tender-hearted creature.
Which makes what I’m going through now all the more grotesquely amusing. I liked to show off about how little I passed urine? Now I can’t pass it at all. My sorrowful sojourn in the world of urology began when I woke up after having surgery for a spinal abscess. I still don’t know what drugs they gave me at the Royal Sussex County Hospital to put me under for the very long and complex operation, but a doctor friend at a London hospital described the standard as ‘stuff so strong it makes fentanyl look like Calpol’. For a good fortnight, lying in my own muck in a hospital bed on a noisy ward with fluorescent lights (and knock-out views of Brighton, to be fair) honestly seemed like the best time I’d ever had. I actually emailed my husband: ‘It’s like a 5-star hotel – I don’t ever want to come home!’
Sound of hollow laughter; three months later, I’m still in hospital, albeit one in West Sussex. I’m no longer wearing nappies and messing myself round the clock, but one of the elements that made my post-surgery recovery so cosy – being fitted with a catheter and not having to trundle off to the toilet, hospital lavs being notoriously vile – has now complicated it. The way it’s looking, The Camel won’t ever be passing water normally again.
After a few months of wearing a catheter, the powers that be in my rehabilitation unit decided that I was a candidate for the feared and desired ‘TWOC’ – Trying Without Catheter. Achieving TWOC is the Olympic gold of the catheter-wearing hospital population and the failure rate, from what I gleaned on my ward, is almost as high, once the rubbery intimate chum has been in place for a long time. On the designated morning, it is removed with a flourish (I was surprised how little pain is involved in the whole catheter business, or maybe I’m just blasé down there). The ex-wearer, now re-equipped with nothing but their natural-born bladder, is instructed to drink copious amounts of water. Then nature will hopefully take its course – but often, as in my case, the poor superfluous organ has forgotten how to perform; it is the opposite of incontinent, which sounds cool, but is actually dangerous. My mid-section swelled up like a balloon, which looked even more comical considering the amount of weight I’ve lost since my surgery, on top of the weight I lost last year on semaglutides. (I never thought I’d be haggard; my prominent cheekbones taunt me, smirking: ‘Look at us! We could have been here in your middle age, if you hadn’t been such an incorrigible booze-hound!’) I was given a bladder scan – like being pregnant, but the opposite – and swiftly re-catheterised, with the promise that we would ‘try again’ in a couple of weeks.
My catheter bag was returned to me, and I strapped it to my leg with mixed emotions. Though it resembles the world’s surliest and most silent ventriloquist’s puppet, I’d become somewhat attached to it, and not just in the obvious way. It represents a kind of freedom. I can whizz about in my wheelchair with it turned off and feel almost carefree. Almost. I quickly discovered that if I wore the bag with the tight black leggings and the short jaunty kilts which make up the majority of my wardrobe, plus my mandatory lipstick and mascara, I looked like something from a very niche kind of fetish pornography, where gerontophilia meets abasiiophilia. To maintain any sort of decency, I need to wear leg-obscuring clothing, which dismays me. I always revelled in my long-legged tallness; it’s bad enough being shorter now than everyone else (my husband, the rotter, has even been known to pat me on the head) without having to hide my gorgeous gams. Also, there was a horrible incident with a loose bag fastening coming free when the vessel was full, leaving me feeling like the sole crouton in a bed-shaped bowl of urine soup.
There was a horrible incident with a loose bag fastening coming free
Predictably, I failed my TWOC a second time – I never was any good at exams – and the concept of ‘intermittent self-catheterisation’ arose, whereby one inserts a catheter into one’s urethra every four hours. With their straightforward urinary plumbing, men have it easy, but for females it rather resembles an infernal version of the old television show The Golden Shot. ‘It’s very small,’ one nurse observed as I tried to find the sweet spot; probably the only time in my life I have wished for larger genitalia, as I stabbed vainly at myself with a lubricated plastic wand. I’ve been trying to get the hang of it for a week now, but I think I’m going to end up with a catheter without the bag, just the little rubber tube with the plastic opening/closing – the ‘flip-flow’ – resting halfway down the inner thigh; it will mimic the one thing about having a penis that I’ve ever envied, the ability to urinate quickly and tidily. I only hope I don’t start doing it up against walls like men do, showing off.
I can just see my poor mother’s face, a tiny bit suspicious that I somehow contrived this to happen, just to be special, but mostly full of love and sorrow and compassion, as she contemplates the unforeseen path her cherished, baffling daughter is set upon, going down that lonesome road in a wheelchair, face boldly set towards the sunset of her life, hoping for the best, hand on her flip-flow like some ancient, damaged, defiant old gunslinger. Only a blithering idiot would have chosen this dark and dusty highway that I’m on – but I’m not defeated by it and I’m going to do my damnedest to get some fun out of it on my way to that stern and implacable tombstone.
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