Was mother right?

Last Tuesday I had the dubious pleasure of a procedure to remove and replace a stent from between my bladder and kidney. Now as many of you will know there's only one way into the body to do that, but at least I had the benefit of general anaesthetic. Once consciousness had been regained I was carted of to a ward to rest up before having the catheter removed and being packed off home. Everything in the garden was rosy - or so I thought.

Mid afternoon I found my bed surrounded by the head urologist and members of his team, and felt quite honoured that they'd visited me. That feeling soon disappeared. It was good news bad news time. The good was that they managed to get the old stent out, but the bad was that they couldn't get a new one in. This was partly due to my ureter shrinking as soon as the installed stent was removed, and partly due to calcification. I was furring up like a kettle! The chances are that I will need a nephrostomy (see previous post) as my left ureter will eventually block off.

Once home I started to realised what the many attempts to get a new stent in had done to me. Going for a pee was absolute agony and blood flowed freely. It's been a long time since my eyes watered with such regularity! After a day of this I started taking paracetamol to ease the pain, and when that failed I dug out some Tramadol hoarded after my last operation, but they didn't seem to help either. After five days of this I was getting to the end of my tether. Then my mother came to my rescue.

Not physically, you understand, but I recalled that when I was a kid if there was anything wrong with stomach or waterworks we were given home made barley water. She would boil up a pan of pearl barley to get the juice, and I can remember actually eating the residual cooked barley mad into a milk pudding. Would something along those lines help? Nah.

However, having found some Pink Grapefruit and Barley cordial on the pantry I decided it might be worth a try. Realising that the actual barley content would be fairly low I drunk as much as I could, and would you believe it seemed to do the trick. I'd stopped taking pain killers as they were doing nothing, but within 24 hours of ploughing my system with the barley drink the bleeding and pain were greatly reduced, and the following day had gone completely.

My wife is convinced this improvement was just a coincidence, but I'm not so sure. To go from such pain and distress to almost nothing in such a sort space of time must have had help, and I remain certain that after 50+ years, mother's remedy was the reason.