Diane Newman: I'm Diane Newman. I'm a nurse practitioner who specializes in urology and I've been doing that for the past 35 years, seeing patients who have problems with their bladder. Urology is a medical specialty that deals with problems with the bladder, the kidneys, but specifically today, I'm going to talk about problems with a bladder where you cannot empty your bladder. That means you cannot adequately urinate, pee all the urine out of your bladder. This happens with men and women who may have certain medical conditions such as a spinal cord injury, diabetes, multiple sclerosis. We do see different types of reasons why someone cannot empty their bladder. Well, if you can't empty your bladder, can cause problems. You got to have some method. And we do catheterization, something called intermittent catheterization, which means that we do it intermittently throughout the day five or six times a day, depending on how much you're drinking, so that you can get that urine out of your bladder, if you cannot do it naturally.

I want to show you a couple products and these are called catheter systems. And by systems I mean, they're more than just the catheter. And I have some products here by Cure Medical that I want to go over. This is the packaging that you'll see. It tells you what it is. We call it closed system because all the product that you need is enclosed within this packaging. 14 French, the company, tells you what's actually in this actual kit. Okay? And I have it opened here. And with this kit, there's a couple features that are important. This one happens to have gloves, okay? Some gauze. They have gloves, gauze, something maybe to wash around the opening to your urethra before you put the catheter in. Most people do not need to use all these types of products when they catheterize, but they do have these available for you if you need them.

But these products also come without these additional types of things to use for catheterization. They just come with this. And this is a really neat technology for a catheter. Look at this. It has a bag. All right. Say you're out in a restaurant or you're traveling. You basically can use this catheter, drain the urine into this bag, and throw the whole thing away. It is lubricated. It's important that the catheter is lubricated. I'm not sure you can see here, but there's lubrication on here. Okay. You don't have to worry about that. It's covering the tip of the catheter and you could pull that off with your finger. That's one way of doing it. It's very easy to do. And I want to talk to you about something that's here as far as what's important for catheterization. There's something called an introducer tip.

And that's this little piece here. Okay. There's some small research that shows at the beginning of your urethra, okay? The beginning, the first portion of it harbors bacteria. When you put the catheter in, you're pushing that bacteria into your bladder. With an introducer tip, you bypass that beginning section of your urethra. This section goes into the urethra. I want to show you on this model here. What you would do is you would put that introduce your tip in, and then you would pass the catheter into the bladder. All right. And that catheter is, and let me show you, when you pass it, it goes beyond the tip there. Okay. For catheterization. And you can see the lubrication on that. And then you pass the entire catheter into the bladder. All right. And then you can drain it out into the bag and throw the entire thing away. This is called a closed system. Now I want to show you about a different product that I found can be very helpful for certain patients. And this product is called the Dextra. It's by Cure Medical. And it actually has an aid for catheterization.

You can see here, the product is in the packaging here, but I have it open. And let me show you this product. It was really developed for individuals who have issues with dexterity. You can see here that this little [inaudible 00:04:24] thing will advance the catheter. And let me show you how it advance this. This is the tip that comes off. You can see here, there's an introducer tip. It is lubricated. You can advance the catheter seed coming out and you can just advance it using your thumb, but also say, you can't really get your thumb on there. You can use the palm of your hand and pass it. Look at that. You can use this actually, if maybe your fingers are such that they can't really manipulate it. You also can use this to help guide it. You can put your finger in there. Look at that. I have my fingers in there. I have this here, and if I'm catheterizing, I can look at that.

Look how nice that is. Moving back and forth, advancing that catheter. This may look somewhat awkward for you, but then if I was catheterizing, okay. Think about if I was a man. Okay. And basically I want to catheterize, you can utilize this and advance this catheter into the bladder. And also with a female. This would be helpful for individuals who maybe, again, have problems with contractions of their hand, sensation, what we call they don't have good dexterity. With this type of guide here, this type of product, you can really advance this catheter. And I hope that what you're seeing is there's so many options for individuals to assist you to safely catheterize yourself, because you need to do that. You need to keep that bladder empty.