Jul
9
Living with Prostate Problems. COPING WITH YOUR BPH.
July 9, 2009 |
YOUR PROSTATE
PLAN IT OUT AHEAD
There are other ways to live more comfortably with your BPH.
• A long car trip. Plan where you’re going to stop. Most car rides tend to stimulate the urinary tract. This may be partly due to nervous tension if you’re the driver. Figure out where you can stop at least every two hours.
This will allow you to gas up, have a snack and use the bathroom. Some patients with BPH say sometimes on car trips they have been stuck in big cities where there were no filling stations, and by the time they found one they nearly tore the door off the men’s room to get inside.
• Going to a scary or suspenseful movie? Again nervous tension can increase the need to urinate. Performers get this problem before they go on. A really wild movie can do the same thing to most men. Try to use the bathroom before the movie starts. As a precaution, don’t buy a large cola drink to go along with your popcorn.
Remember “a pint in, a pint out,” and often the “pint out” part won’t wait until the movie is over.
• Let’s say you waited too long, your whole crotch is burning and throbbing and you have to urinate so bad you’re almost upset to your stomach. When you at last get to a bathroom, try for the toilet stall. Simply close the door, drop your pants and sit down.
No one seems to know why, but sitting down to urinate relaxes some muscles or the sphincter muscle, or something, and it makes urination at these difficult times much easier. At stress times like this, many BPH patients say it’s taken them five minutes of standing at a urinal or at the bathroom at home before they can get even a drop of urine out.
Spasming of muscles seems to be relaxed, and the whole system simply works easier and much faster in these stress situations, if you can sit down and bend forward toward your knees.
At this point who cares why it works, it does and will work any time you have trouble getting a urine flow started as well. Don’t fight it, just try it!
COPING WITH YOUR BPH
You’ve known that you’ve been living with your BPH for what - a year, three years? You’re a short timer. Most urologists have had literally thousands of years of experience with BPH through their patients. Your doctor may have a dozen little hints and helps like those above that have worked for hundreds of his BPH patients. No, these are not big dramatic findings that can be reported in the New England Journal of Medicine or the Journal of the American Medical Association.
However, your own doctor or urologist may have a small gold mine of tips and hints that he’s picked up over the years to make a big difference in how you can live easier and more comfortably with early and more advanced stages of BPH.
The next time you’re in his office, ask him if he has any of these little gems of BPH trivia advice that might just fit some problem that you’ve been having. The best advice is: Always go to the expert: talk to your urologist.