People are creative. They are do-it-yourself-ers who can adapt things for uses not originally intended. Sometimes it is a good idea – like an empty baby carriage to double as a shopping cart (OBVIOUSLY it must be empty). Sometimes it is a bad idea. Like this case.
I remember as a resident I had a 60ish, Russian speaking male patient who was brought in for lethargy and subjective fever. He would not get off his easy chair. He was quite obese and even on a good day, would not be very mobile. However lately, he would get up only once or twice a day. Now he was here with a fever of 101 and lethargic.
Well, it was obvious he was septic – and in obese older people, a urinary tract infection is up there as a common cause. So, I went over and asked the wife if the man could give us a urine sample – “no”, she said. He was too out of it. Fine, the nurse went in to catheterise him and shortly afterwards came out with a look of shock. “Doc, you gotta see this.”
She could not place the foley catheter – because he had already fashioned one for himself out of house hold items! There, strapped to his leg, was a plastic Head and Shoulders shampoo bottle with a piece of rubber tubing coming out the top cap. It ran up his leg and was attached to the other end on a medication bottle – the bottle had a rectangular piece cut out of the side into which his penis protruded. The other end of the bottle had a large rubber band fed through it which went around his waist! Basically he had made a crude Texas Catheter! The trouble was, in addition to it being TOTALLY not sterile and disgusting, the med bottle was not sealed around his penis and the rubber tubing could not drain the urine fast enough to prevent it from pooling and spilling out around the edges. He penis was basically sitting in a small pool of old urine – teeming with bacteria!
The wife looked at us and acted like “I was telling him so!!!” when we expressed alarm and repellence at the site of his creation. Evidently he was so lazy, obese and deconditioned that he did not want to waste his time getting up to void – so he made his little microbial Habitrail! Sure enough he was uroseptic and was admitted for IV antibiotics.
I think he might have some trouble patenting that one..,…
That is so sick that I just can’t believe it-
But unfortunately I know it’s true!
I think David Sedaris had something like that…
http://youtube.com/watch?v=YBdymtyXt8Y
[...] Stories Blog has a story on a homemade urine collection system (makes you realize that there are a lot of strange people out [...]
Wow. Now I wish I had started off my day reading someone else’s blog.
We picked up a heroin junkie one time, (had diabetes also) that had catheterized himself with a bic pen, he’d just put vaseline on it and put it in there and then pee. Naturally it was infected, black, and looked like it was rotting off. He was one of our frequent fliers after that initial time, until he died while doing autoerotic asphyxiation. He hung himself. Big fun.
You know I would probably have doubted this story before I started working in the ER. Now I have had some weeks of experience and seen some of the really dumb things people do. Wonder what was going through his mind?
While in Honduras with the Army we were doing a MEDCAP and I saw a guy that had an enlarged prostate and couldn’t pee. His solution was to have a foley placed that he plugged with a cork. When it was time to go, he took out the cork and laid it on a rock and let fly.
Obviously, he had another raging infection when I saw him. Surgery was not an option for him……