In April 2026 I fell while cycling and landed astride the bar. The impact ruptured my bulbar urethra — a straddle injury.
What followed was a suprapubic catheter placed the same day, three months of waiting, an anastomotic urethroplasty, a month with two catheters, and the slow business of learning to pass urine again.
I have no medical training. Everything here is written from the patient's side of it.
Where the material came from
My own notes. I wrote down what I felt, when, and how it changed — often at 2am, because that is when most of this becomes frightening.
My own photographs. Every image in the handbook is mine, taken at home on a phone. They are cropped and resized, and nothing else has been altered.
My hospital records. Discharge summaries, operative notes and test reports from the three hospitals involved, which is where the descriptions of the procedures come from.
My urologists. Explanations given to me in consultations, and answers to the questions I kept bringing back.
An AI assistant. Through the worst weeks I asked questions to an AI as symptoms appeared, often in the middle of the night when there was nobody to ask. Those exchanges became the backbone of the question list — they are a record of what actually worried me, in the order it worried me.
Published urology literature. Used only in the few places where the handbook quotes figures, such as how often erectile or ejaculatory changes are reported after urethroplasty.
How it was put together
The questions are the ones I actually asked, rewritten so each covers a single symptom rather than the rambling way it came out at the time.
They are ordered by phase and roughly by when they occur, so you can read only the part you are living through.
Each answer opens with a plain verdict, then the practical points, then a separate box explaining the biology — which you can skip entirely if you only want to know whether something is normal.
I used an AI assistant to help organise, write and edit the material. Every claim about my own experience is mine; the structure and much of the phrasing were worked out together.
What it is not
Please read this part
Not medical advice. It contains no prescriptions, no doses and no treatment instructions. Where a medicine or a change to your catheter might help, it says to ask your doctor, because that decision belongs to the people who have seen your imaging.
Not a substitute for your urologist. If something here contradicts what your team tells you, follow your team.
Not complete. One person cannot experience every complication. Where I have described something I did not go through myself, it is drawn from what is commonly reported, and it is written as such.
Not universal. Recovery varies enormously with the cause, the length of the narrowing and the type of repair. Yours will not match mine exactly.
Corrections and updates
The handbook carries a last-updated date. I revise it as my own recovery continues and as people write in.
If you are a clinician and something here is wrong or misleading, please tell me. I would rather fix it than defend it.
If you are a patient and something you went through is missing, tell me that too. The gaps in this handbook are the parts I did not experience.
Hospitals and clinics are welcome to print it or share it with patients. There is no permission to ask for.