This, That, and the Other

For this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, Linda G. Hill has given us “the last thing you emptied.” She wants us to think of the last thing we emptied or something we empty often and use it as our response to this prompt.

I consider you to be a friend so I’m going to tell you something that I haven’t told anyone else. I’m trusting you to keep this between us. Do we have a deal? Great.

I know I shared with you in this post a malady I suffer from, Old Man’s Syndrome (OMS). It’s an affliction that usually starts to manifest itself when men enter their sixties and begin to feel the aches, pains, and indignities that come with old age. It also means not being able to sleep through an entire night without having to get up to pee.

My OMS occurs virtually every night somewhere between 2 and 5 a.m. That’s when I wake up and have no option but to get out of bed to go pee. It doesn’t matter whether I stop drinking fluids right at dinnertime or continue to imbibe until just before bedtime. At some point during the night I have to take a leak.

But again, you know all that about me. And you also know that just over two months ago I fell off a ladder and broke my hip. I had to have an emergency partial hip replacement surgery and am recuperating from it as we speak.

But you didn’t know what I’m about to tell you, and I’m only telling you this because Linda asked me to. You see, I still need a walker to get around. And that includes getting from my bed to my bathroom when my nightly need to pee occurs. Sitting up, getting out of bed, reaching for my walker, and half rolling, half limping from bed to bathroom while half asleep, doing my business, and then half rolling, half limping, and getting back into bed is a bit of an ordeal.

In order to avoid that hassle — I can’t believe I’m actually telling you this — I keep a men’s urinal bottle like the one pictured below, at my bedside.

When I wake up and have to pee, rather than struggling with the walker to get up and go to the bathroom, I reach over and grab the men’s urinal bottle, strategically position it between my legs, position my thingie at the wide mouth of the bottle, and let it flow.

I know it sounds gross, but I’ll continue to do this until I can get out of bed and simply walk to the bathroom and pee without having to use my walker.

When it’s time to wake up in the morning, I get my walker, grab my men’s urinal bottle, and then half roll, half limp to the bathroom, and empty out the bottle of nocturnal piss into the toilet. Then, of course, I rinse out the bottle.

Remember, you promised not to tell any one, so let’s keep this confession between just the two of us, right?