Did the picture get your attention?
This, dear friends, is an external female urinary collection device. Rather than describe how it fits, I’ll show you a picture…
I called it a “banana” because it looked like one and it made talking about it a little easier. It does just what it looks like, curves between the legs, tapes to the belly, and a tube comes out the top and runs to the collection device.
They used this in the ICU for me because I couldn’t get out of bed by myself to go to the bathroom and I was on a water pill so I had to go frequently and often without warning. Unfortunately, I also have stress incontinence so when I cough, sneeze, or cry hard, I pee. If you recall, that is what led to pee sea.
But look at this picture. Imagine, if you dare, being the female who needs this and has to be on their stomach. Now imagine, being that female and having a male nurse trying to figure out how to put it on you when you are already on your stomach because they forgot it before you rolled over and with all the tubes and wires and drugs and the inability to breathe…well rolling back over to roll over again, just wasn’t in the cards.
I laughed the day this happened because he was so sure he could get it done. He told the other nurse to go ahead and leave. He knew how to do it without disrupting the gentle balance that was everything I was connected to. They were just tubes after all, how hard could it be? That should have been a sign that something was going to happen.
I don’t remember how long it took but eventually, he left satisfied he had mastered these crazy tubes and I just hoped he was right.
So, there I was, on my stomach, having just had my bedding changed. I had drunk the water I was supposed to drink and had taken all the pills I was supposed to take, including the water pill. Just as I was beginning to drift off to sleep, I started to cough. I’ve already explained the problem with coughing, the water pill didn’t help but I wasn’t super worried because I had a new banana in place, so I should have been golden. No pun intended.
The pee started to flow. I tried to control the flow to whatever degree I could so as not to overwhelm the “banana” but to no avail. Suddenly, pee was hitting my back and rear and it felt to me like the blankets were moving. How could that be? I was perplexed. Maybe they’d given me more morphine than I thought?
The nurse came in before I could even push the call button, laughing because he saw the blankets moving and said it looked like a fountain, and there was only one reason a fountain would be moving my blankets. Yes, he got the tubing wrong somewhere and instead of the pee going through the tube to the collection device, it was actually being directed straight up in the air. He laughed. I was mortified but told myself I would laugh eventually. (I’m kind of laughing today, but only kind of…one day it will be as funny to me as I know it is.)
He and another nurse helped me up and out of bed so they could change the sheets and my gown and give me a new “banana”, and I fell asleep dreaming of fountains.
