Going in for an AUS Tomorrow (June 30)

I'm going in early tomorrow morning (5:50 am) to get an AUS put in me. Thanks to Big Mac (and others), I know what I'm in for tomorrow and in the days following. If I have my wits about me, I'll try to post something coherent about my experience.

Mike

Mike,
Congrats on your decision. The surgery and recovery were pretty rough but the results are well worth it!
The only disappointing part was having to wait 6 weeks for activation but it does take that long for the soreness and swelling to subside.

I see you live in the SF Bay Area. I did also in the 70's, around Dublin-San Ramon area.

Count down to dryness has begun.

Good luck on your recovery. Be sure to have a couple of bags of frozen peas on hand to combat the swelling.

Bill from Florida

Thank you, DYank, Big Mac and Peter DisAbelard! I deep appreciate your thoughts and good wishes!

The reason I did this, DYank, was - like your DH - to gain back some of that quality of life i enjoyed before I had my prostate removed. I'm looking forward to activation in 6 weeks and not using pads or a penile clamp either.

Bill, I live in Livermore, just a few miles from your haunts in the 70s. In fact, I passed through San Ramon and Dublin on my way home from the hospital this morning. I do have frozen peas, frozen corn and ice packs at the ready for the swelling. I also brought from the hospital antibiotics, pain medication and stool softener (for the side effects of the pain medicine). I will definitely be taking the antibiotic and will take the pain medicine (norco) only if I need it. Right now, I feel no pain - just soreness when I stretch in a way to tug on the incisions. I have a little swelling in my scrotum but not as much as I expected. I can feel the control device floating in there.

Peter, here is a summary of my experience so far: Admitted to the hospital early yesterday morning and went into surgery about an hour later. Was asleep within 5 minutes entering the OR and woke up about 3 1/2 hours later in the recovery room. Don't remember anything about that period of time. Memory of being in the recovery room is little fuzzy too. Eventually, I was wheeled into a room where I spent the night hooked up to an IV and a Foley bag. My doctor came by and told me the surgery went well. He encouraged me to walk as much as I could. I was able to eat a dinner of noodle soup and juice. Read a bit and then go up and walked around the ward for 15-20 minutes before I went to bed. Nurses kept waking me during the night to do things I was too sleepy to remember. They finally got me up at 6:00 this morning and removed the catheter. I talked them into giving me breakfast and coffee. Then my doctor came by to check my incisions and give me instructions/restrictions for the next 6 weeks. I walked some more and was finally discharged at 10:30 and now I'm home.

I have to say this was an easier experience than my DaVinci surgery. I felt better coming out of surgery this time and I'm told I looked much better too. Like the DaVinci procedure, I have taken little pain medication because I'm not in any pain right now. I am bruised around the incisions and have to watch how I move but otherwise I feel normal. Oh, and I'm leaking heavily. I put on one heavy-duty pad just before discharge and by the time I got home, it was soaked full. Now to wait for the healing and dryness eventually!

Mike

Hey Mike, welcome to the other side. Sorry I missed your post yesterday.
Sounds like you are doing well. Now the waiting begins. The good news is at least you know you will be dry in 6 weeks. The not knowing drives us crazy.
You must have had your surgery in the Concord/Walnut Creek area.
Be careful getting in and out of the car, the upper incision hurts if you bend over.
I slept with a pillow between by legs to add extra padding.
My swelling started about 2 days after surgery and lasted about 4-5 days.

Bill from Florida

Hi Bill, good to hear from you! My swelling started right on schedule then: had surgery Monday morning and I noticed the swelling this morning. I've also noticed that the back of my scrotum is numb - didn't expect that. I see that now I have a little pain when I sit on a hard chair. Luckily I bought an inflatable ring to deal with that problem. Finally, I haven't been in a car since I got home yesterday but do notice that when I twist in certain directions I get a little tug down in my groin. Whew, 6 weeks can't pass fast enough for me!

Mike

Thanks for telling us your AUS story, been considering taking the plunge for years so have been following recent threads here. I had wondered if a clamp would be too uncomfortable or perhaps prohibited by your doc during the recovery.

Good luck and I look forward to reading about your successful activation.

Glad to hear the implantation when well. Welcome to the club. Your experience, so far, sounds more the usual than Big Mac's more painful recovery. I know the thought process you went thought, the idea of an manual on-off pee pee is not anybody's dream, but it for some of us it is the only closest thing to normal that we can be. It allows you not to have to worry about you incontinence issue all the time.
Well anyway, congratulations.
Ron

Good hear you are progressing well Mike. Keep those peas stored in the freezer and on demand when needed.

Accepting that you are going tp pee differently than you have all your life was harder to accept that the pains of surgery. Now, 3 weeks after activation, it was well worth it to be dry again.

No one knows but you so don't worry about others, besides they didn't have to walk in your shoes leaking and changing pads for months and years.

Now just sit back and cross the days off the calendar until activation.

Bill from Florida

Now is the 4th day since I had surgery to implant an AUS, which I hope will give me a much greater degree of continence than I have now. There is no big change: there is still swelling in my pubic area where the surgeon put the reservoir, swelling and bruising still in my scrotum (and numbness too - thus the term "numb nuts" truly does apply now) and swelling around my perineum. There is less bruising in the public area and I took off the bandage covering the incision there. Looks like I'll have a nice, long scar there to add to my collection of surgery scars from the DaVinci experience.

Another thing I've noticed is that, since my one night in the hospital, I've had trouble falling asleep and staying asleep. So my wife (an RN) suggested I take a sleep aid to help me get better sleep. I'll do that tonight because I'm starting to feel a little beat-up, not from discomfort from the surgery, but not getting my usual good nights of sleep. This is one effect I didn't expect and I'm not even sure I can relate it to the surgery. Ah well, 38 days to go before activation!

Mike

Bill, that's the med I'm going to take tonight when I go to bed. I hope I can get a better night's sleep by doing that. Yeah, I hate to take the pain meds because 1) I can't drive when I do and 2) they constipate me, which then means I have to take a stool softener.

I sleep on my side anyway; so the incisions haven't been a problem at night for me. So far, the worst thing has been two restrictions: no squatting and no heavy lifting. So, I've had to modify some of the things I do to avoid busting incisions. 38 days to go before activation (and lifting of restrictions)!

Mike

Neo said....."But activation day is a breeze.".

I beg to differ with you Neo. It SHOULD be a breeze if you get coached well!

It was the worst day of the procedure with me. I had no idea I had to squeeze harder to urinate than I did. I must have squeezed the controller way to soft because nothing happened. I guess all these years of getting hit between the legs and getting hurt makes us not want to squeeze the scrotum to hard for fear of soreness in that area but you will need to. When my uro showed me on the second attempt at activation, I got it and it has been a breeze ever since. He did a great job explaining, showing me, doing it again until he felt I had it.

And I agree, it will take all of the 6 weeks for the swelling to go down to normal again.

Bill from Florida

Bill, thanks to your experience, I'm going to make sure I can open the cuff using the control device before I leave my urologist's office. He gave me a set of instructions from AMS on how to use the AUS, including a ring with four plastic cards and a dummy control device. about a week before activation, I'm going to start squeezing that dummy device just to get a feel for it. That of course will be "dry firing" and I'm not going to know for sure what it feels like until activation and I can do live firing with the real device.

Mike

Bill, it sounds like you and I have the same thing - mine is from AMS. You confirmed for me what I thought: when you squeeze the dummy device, you get no idea of how much pressure to use to open the cuff. Do you get the sensation of the cuff opening up when you squeeze the right way? If so, that's probably going to take some getting used to.

Maybe it's a good thing that it takes a good squeeze to open the cuff because otherwise we might be having lots of accidental releases when we didn't intend to. I remember reading about the AUS here on the HW forum that some guy sat down in a way to open his AUS and he had an accidental pee. Reading that made me a bit leery about getting an AUS - could see that happening to me - and I held out for a while on even considering the AUS.

I think you're right - eventually we're going to become experts, like Neo, on using our devices. We're sure going to get a lot of practice at it ... if we want to pee anyway. So, we'll be motivated to use the device early and often.

Mike