I’ve just had to pay a large fine for wasting hospital time – or at least I should have done. That’s the view of a stomacare nurse when I told her I’d started using a Medina catheter for the first time.
“Just think, you’ve spent twelve years hanging around in hospital waiting-rooms, going to appointments with puzzled consultants and making worried phone calls about your troublesome pouch when all you had to do was use a catheter,” she told me.
And she was quite right of course. For in 1996 I was given one of these long thin plastic tubes by a nurse specialist at St Mark’s to try and clear my reluctant pouch.
