Testing urine flow and prepping your prostate

The thing about your prostate is that it wraps itself around the urethra down which your wee comes from the bladder, before exiting to the outside world via the penis. When all's well, then all is indeed well. However, as you get older, the prostate grows and, as it grows, it can compress the urethra, making you urination more difficult.

For this reason, you'll find that you dribble rather than gush, you may sometimes find it hard to finish a wee and you can also experience "urgency" where you actually find it hard to restrain a wee from coming (usually when you are in sight of a toilet, is my experience!).


Worse still, if someone messes about with the prostate, by doing a biopsy, irradiating or piercing it for some reason, then it is also likely to swell, just like any other part of your anatomy when it's suffered trauma.

When you're being lined up for treatment, the hospital staff want to be sure that you'll still be able to pass water after your op. Therefore, they give you a urine flow test. This is not  nearly as exciting as it sounds. You'll see a large funnel suspended in a frame, with a receptacle beneath it to catch your wee. This is standing on top of some fancy equipment that looks like scales, but actually monitors the time you wee for, how much you wee and whether it is episodic or not. From this, they'll decide whether you already have restrictions in your urethra or whether you're a super-blaster (that was me).

That's a simple external test to check flow, but they also want you to prepare your prostate for its ordeal by exercising it and the muscles that are nearby. The best exercise is pelvic floor muscle tensioning. There's a good article here on the Prostate Cancer UK site. These exercises are designed to strengthen the pelvic floor, which will help with everything from bladder control to erections.

My GP, some years ago, suggested doing these as a way of improving my sex life. Needless to say, Gloria approved of that. They're very simple:

• Sit or stand or lie down and then relax all your muscles
• Without clenching your buttocks, pull back inside as if you were closing up the entry to your anus. At the same time, imagine you are weeing and pull back inside as if you were trying to stop it happening
• These two actions need to take place without other muscles being tightened - the tendency is to squeeze your buttocks together
• Repeat this until you get the idea and you can reliably identify the right muscles to tension
• Then, hold that position for ten seconds and then release it - repeat ten times
• Once you have mastered that, practise rapid-fire tensioning - tighten and release every second or so for ten seconds and repeat that process for a minute

 My daily routine is to do the rapid ones followed by the slower ones while I take my eye-drops - gives me something to do!

And it works. You'll get better control of your urination, feel less desperation to wee and you'll have better and more effective erections. All of this is good preparation to get your prostate and its associated bits and bobs in top running order, ready for your op.

Tomorrow is the visit to the Clinical Oncologist as the first step in getting ready for surgery - I'll be back to tell you how that went.