Back up to the hospital this week for a spot of Urodynamics. No, it's not a new exercise regime, but an investigation of the bladder. It involves various pipes, bottles of liquid, injections and all kinds of eye-watering stuff. Thankfully I don't get to feel any of this, but I did get to see my bladder on a real-time x-ray as it was filled with a special liquid that showed up on the screen.
I must confess that I find all this stuff quite fascinating, although I can understand if you don't. It's just that the human body is filled with all kinds of strangeness. We tend to think of our bodies as machines, probably because it's more reassuring that way.
The reality is that we are just a big pile of quite fragile gloop hanging off a stack of bones. But within that gloop are all kinds of very sophisticated systems to keep us alive. The bladder may not seem like the most fascinating area to investigate, but it does all kinds of stuff that we tend to take for granted.
As with many bodily functions, much of the decision making takes place in areas other than the brain, often in the spinal cord.
In the case of the bladder, it fills up until it reaches a certain capacity, and then the muscles in the bladder wall tighten and the sphincter (or valve, for the mechanically minded) opens to release the...wee-wee, to use the technical terminology.
Before this happens, the brain intervenes to make sure that we only drain our bladders at the most socially acceptable time. But this isn't a natural process, but something that we learn to do. You know, potty training.
However, if the connection between the brain and the spinal cord is broken, then there is no way to intervene to prevent the bladder from acting autonomously and emptying when full. This can be inconvenient or even embarrassing for some people with spinal cord injury. The idea of the urodynamics is to check out the health of the bladder, as well as to ascertain when the wall of the bladder goes into spasm, and thus to aid the owner of the bladder to intervene before it's too late. There are also a number of different medications that can help to prevent this from happening. another option is to have a Botox injection into the bladder to prevent it from going into spasm.
So there. Maybe one day I'll be going to get a Botox jab on the NHS.
I must confess that I find all this stuff quite fascinating, although I can understand if you don't. It's just that the human body is filled with all kinds of strangeness. We tend to think of our bodies as machines, probably because it's more reassuring that way.
The reality is that we are just a big pile of quite fragile gloop hanging off a stack of bones. But within that gloop are all kinds of very sophisticated systems to keep us alive. The bladder may not seem like the most fascinating area to investigate, but it does all kinds of stuff that we tend to take for granted.
As with many bodily functions, much of the decision making takes place in areas other than the brain, often in the spinal cord.
In the case of the bladder, it fills up until it reaches a certain capacity, and then the muscles in the bladder wall tighten and the sphincter (or valve, for the mechanically minded) opens to release the...wee-wee, to use the technical terminology.
Before this happens, the brain intervenes to make sure that we only drain our bladders at the most socially acceptable time. But this isn't a natural process, but something that we learn to do. You know, potty training.
However, if the connection between the brain and the spinal cord is broken, then there is no way to intervene to prevent the bladder from acting autonomously and emptying when full. This can be inconvenient or even embarrassing for some people with spinal cord injury. The idea of the urodynamics is to check out the health of the bladder, as well as to ascertain when the wall of the bladder goes into spasm, and thus to aid the owner of the bladder to intervene before it's too late. There are also a number of different medications that can help to prevent this from happening. another option is to have a Botox injection into the bladder to prevent it from going into spasm.
So there. Maybe one day I'll be going to get a Botox jab on the NHS.
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