 Hi YouTube, this is Mark from Abilities and a little while back I did a video on Intermined Capitalization. Talked about some different types available that I had tried and used. Today what I wanted to do was actually show you how I catheterize myself using one of these closed systems which is this RUGE MMGH2O. So before I get to actually using a catheter or what I wanted to mention or let's talk about is how are you going to get to the entry point. So this really depends on how you're sitting in your chair and what type of clothing you're going to be wearing. I think if you're new to catheterization the best thing that you can do in terms of clothing is to wear something that has a zipper. For me what I tend to do is I scoot out of my chair a little bit here and I will just essentially undo my pants and get to the area where I need to and then just pull my pants down. So in this situation I'm just kind of showing you like I would just pull my pants down to where I can get to the area in order to do it. So that's kind of general idea. If you're more advanced you know I've seen some people that will use something that has like a elastic waistband, maybe like basketball shorts or sweatpants. That's fine. If you can pull those up and down that's good. I've seen people use like a bungee cord to put on the front and pull them down so they can get to the entry point. It just really depends on what you're comfortable with. But if you're new to it I would say you know find shorts or pants or something like that that have a zipper that way you can kind of get them down a little bit easier to be able to access and get the catheter in. Okay now let's talk about this catheter. This is the Rosham MGH2O. I said this is a hydrophilic catheter. I really like these. They're smooth. They go in a lot easier at least for me than the traditional closed system that has a lubricant in it. So let me just go ahead and open this. So the first thing is you'll see a parent's got this little hole which is nice. It's easy to hold. It also makes it a little bit easier to pull it apart. You can do your fingers like this and pull it. And then it ripped. What I typically do is I'll actually use my teeth. I'll just touch the balls part. Yeah and they're not like the easiest. I mean this is as you can see it wasn't like the best. But there's different ways of doing it. If your hands are a little bit moist it's easier to pull apart. Okay so inside the bag is going to be a little bag where you can put all of your items. It comes with this little square which is handy. These catheters at least I've noticed that it's a little leak a little bit. So I'll tend to put this right under where the entry point is and it'll catch some of the saline or urine that comes out. It also has this little square which is like an antiseptic wipe. I really like these. It's part of the whole kind of beam sterile. I use it. You may see some people that for talk to some people when they put the catheter in they just take the sterile catheter and put it in and take it out and they're done. But I like to use this in addition to it. It's more barrier to prevent urinary tract infection. It comes with this little square which I think is handy. I don't use it for the catheterization part. I do keep these. They come in handy for a lot of uses but I actually use this for my bowel program to put the lubricant on it. And I'll show you that in another video. But I do hold onto these because they come in handy. Next thing would be a pair of gloves. I personally don't put on gloves. It's really hard to do. But I do keep these around. If I need help with the bowel program, the insertion of the spository. I may have these around. My wife can help me with it. Or I'll just keep them in general. They're good for a lot of things. Otherwise, unless you have a big box of them, there's no need to keep these in them. But they're good for traveling. And here's the actual catheter. I want to first make a little comparison. I have an older lubricant catheter. And I just want to show you. This is an older Rouge. It has the lubricant in the bag. This for me, as a quad with limited hand-dick sterity. I got a tough time getting this out. I know there's a lot of little tricks that people have told me. You can actually get little clips. You can clip on this and push it out and push it through. But I have a tough time with these older lubricant ones. That's why I really like the hydrophilic because it comes out easier. I'll show you. Alright, so first thing that I'm going to do with this is you can see this little foil bag in the bottom. This is the actual sailing that's going to make this catheter slippery. Now, you have to pop it in order to get the sailing out. I had a little bit of trouble at first, but what I ended up doing was I just fold it over. I'll show you. I just squeeze the top of it down and then just fold it over. By folding it, it creates pressure. I just use this part of my wrist. I squeeze together. You can hear that little noise that popped it. Then you have, I'll just hold it by the top here. It's got the lubricant. Let me do it like this. It'll be easier to see. Kind of smooth it out to make sure it's out. Now, I just kind of go like this and move the lubricant around to get it wet. I'll put this to the side because what I like to do is get the rest of these things ready to go. This bag is a little bit tricky. You may decide you don't need this. If you're in a bathroom where you have trash can in your vial or something like that, you don't need it. But I like it because I can put everything in it. The handy thing about the bag is if you're in a car or you're somewhere else, with the closed system, it gives you the option to really cat yourself anywhere. Which is a comfort piece of mine. If you're out and about, you're going to a barbecue, you don't know the settings. You're thinking, oh gosh, I want to have beer or something drink. I might have to go to the bathroom. With this system, I know I'll give it my mini van if I really need to. I could go into my mini van. I could cat myself. I put it in this bag. It's clean. It's all tucked away. Then you can discard it later at a later time. That's kind of nice. I could do it in order to open this. Sometimes it'll stick. I'll just lick the sides of my palms. Kind of love this to get in there like so. It's going to pop open. Now, just opens a little bit. What I'll do is I'll put my hand in here. Put my hand on top. Force it down. Then I'll put the one crumb and eat, slide it across. Then it opens it up. Now you got an open bag. With this bag, what I tend to do is just say I'm not using the gloves. I'll put those in the trash. I'll also take the actual counter bag. Put it in here as well. Now, this bag, I'll typically be able to see it, but I'll lean it up just against the side of my chair down here at the bottom. That way, as I'm using stuff, I can just put it into the bag. At this point, I would have my pants down. In order to get to the entry point, I'll wear boxer breeze. I'll just take that, fold it back, tuck it behind the man parts, and it should give me access to what I need. If you need to scoot out of your chair a little bit, if you can, that's probably best to get a better angle of entry. That's how I would do it. I could typically have my pants all the way down, everything open before, I'm opening everything up. That way, you're not fumbling around, trying to hold it while you're doing your clothing. What about that point? I'm going to go to the antiseptic white. Again, it's closed. Don't have the finger and the x-terty. You could have a pair of scissors if you want to open this up. That's totally fine. If you have a favorite pair that's small, you can carry them with you. I'll just rip this. I'll bite it on the end and I'll rip down an angle. I'm doing that, it'll open it in a way that it'll allow an edge of this so I can pull out my teeth. The first thing I'll grab is the side. Hold it. Rip it down. Put that in my little bag. It didn't open it up exactly the way I wanted, but if I just bend it out, I get my teeth on it. Pull it out. This little towel that I like to open it all the way up. You don't necessarily have to do that. What I'm going to do is when I open this up, typically, I'll rub this all over the top of the area. I'll rub it all over and I will leave this on top while I'm getting anything else ready to go. I'll leave this antiseptic on top of the entry point. I'll go back to my catheter here. Shake this up a little bit more. Get the liquid. I want a good shape. One of the tricky parts that I know, talking to the quads, they have an issue with this getting this too bad. It goes back to what I was seeing with the other one. When you have the traditional lubricant, it can be very difficult to push this out, especially the catheter soft. Once you get it in, you might not be able to push it through down your urethra again because it's sticking with the lubricant. With this, it's not that at all. You can pull this off at the top. You might fling it up at what I do is I just bite it. Now, if you feel with this lubricant that you can't get it in to your urethra, there is a little bit of lubricant in the tip here. I always keep this just in case. For whatever reason, you can't get the catheter in. Maybe you have a catheterized in a long time. It's dry. It's just not going in. This will help. The lubricant always helps get you through the initial entry point. Just keep this until you figure that out. Again, no lubricant here. It slides out pretty easy. I have some pretty stiff hands, so I'm doing this now. Let's just say it didn't pop out. You could put this on your knee and push your knuckle down on it and kind of force it out. The other way you could do it, bite it, force it out. There's a couple different tricks to doing it. But I typically don't have trouble getting this type of catheter out. Now, once it's out, you got to find a way to hold it. Some people like to not pull it out. They like to put it in directly and then push it. I have a little bit of trouble doing that. So typically, I will push the catheter out about four or five inches before I put it in. This kind of helps you guide it too if you bunch it up. Your hand can fit into it. I'll go ahead and I'll insert it. Get it in about those four or five inches. The nice thing is, once it's in your ether about four or five inches, it creates a little bit of a suction. So at that point, what you can do is straighten out the bag and you can start to pull the bag a little bit. And the catheter will come with it. Now, you might say, oh, that's dangerous. You're pulling on the catheter inside. But really, I'm talking very little movement to pull this bag. Again, with the saline, it's not sticking in the bag. I can't wait until it can move again. So it's going to come right out. Once you have that in, one of the other things is when you get to the entry point, when you get to the part where you're getting past your spanked remus oil and the urine is going to come out, the next question would be, okay, how you hold it? For me, so this little hole is what comes in handy. So once I have this down, I got the catheter in. Typically, if the urine starts flying, I'll just push both hands and hold it in place. Once I have one hand down, I can kind of move this hand over, get my finger into this loop, and then I can just release this hand and hold it. Now, you can see the urine coming out. You can see when it's done. When you get to that point, that's when you can pull it out. I typically use this. This is what's going to hold this catheter in place. Especially if you have a good amount of urine, you know, if you have a lot of volume that's coming out, it's going to get heavy. It's going to start to want to fall. So that's where you want to be able to secure it. This is a very different technique than a straight catheter. You know, straight catheter or the urine is going to drop in the toilet or some type of receptacle. You're not going to get that pressure on the catheter like you would when it's filling up in a bag. So you've got to figure out a good way to hold it, but this is how I would do it. This hole. Okay, so once it's full, you're going to slowly pull it out. Make sure that you pull it out slowly because there is some suction that's pulling the urine out. But once you let go, if you have, let's just say you got this tube out pretty far and you pull it out and it's got urine in it and it's down, that urine is just going to come down to leak all over your pants. So make sure that you're using gravity and you go down low. Once you pull it out to where it gets that red out suction, you're just going to go with the residuals just going to go right back down in the bag. Okay, once you've got that full, there is a little tear piece here. I don't even mess with that. I just go down to about three quarters of my bite, rip, got a nice little hole. Now this may be hard for you to hold. For me, I have decent, Tino-decis with these pinchers. I'll just kind of grab it on the side here and can do it like this. If you want, again, thumb in here. You can lay it on your leg, get really close to the toilet, and I like this. A couple of ways to do it. Just kind of, you know, try it out and do what's comfortable for you. But that's the main idea. And then when I'm done with this, I'm just going to go ahead and discard that as a bag that I have done here. Now, and I didn't have to use this, but again, it's got lubricant in it if you want to, you know, put that in the entry point, you can do that as well. Well, that's pretty much it on how you would use this particular system. One of the things that I do want to mention, so there's different ways of kind of introducing yourself to catheterization. You know, I had to switch from the condom catheter because I was keeping too much residual in my bladder. So I think, at any given point in time, I was keeping between three and four hundred CCs in my bladder, even after kicking off and voiding in the condom cath, which was too much. You know, and it was uncomfortable. So what they recommended, at first was, okay, catheterize a couple times a day, but still use the condom cath. So that was fine. I got used to doing it. I felt better. But after a while, I really liked the idea of not having to have to wear anything or have anything on my leg, that kind of thing. So I started to cath more and more, and I got to a point where I talked to the doctor and said, I don't want to wear the condom cath anymore. What do I do? Is there anything I need to take? So he recommended a medicine called DitroPan, which is very old and there's a lot of new medications now. But the idea with DitroPan is it's an anticholinergic. And what that means is it essentially stops the spasms in your urinary tract. It helps smooth that out. So if you don't have those spasms, you don't have the urge to go to the bathroom. And therefore, I don't think you're kicking off in a year and like your... So your muscles not opening and closing and releasing year in. So by taking that, you know, you're able to actually build up volumes in your bladder, and you're not going to, you know, urinate on yourself. It's a way that you can wear underwear and pants or shorts and no leg bag. It's very liberating feeling. I mean, I felt really good when I got to a point where I could do that. The only thing I want to mention about that, though, is to keep in mind, is, you know, you have to be responsible when you're... When you start taking something like a DitroPan, that's because of the bladder pressures. So if you're not going to be kicking off when your body says, okay, your bladder's got too much urine, you need to be good about caffeine every few hours, depending on, you know, your... How much liquids... How many of that... You know, how much liquid you're putting in your body. So that's the thing. You just have to be careful. You know, I've been in situations where you go out and you go and you have a beer or two, and maybe you're not in your bathroom and you have any conversation. And then you just, oh, you feel like a bladder's full. And because, you know, alcohol or even coffee is like a diuretic, and you're bladder fills it pretty quickly. So you just have to be careful about those things. You know, your habits are going to change. You know, you don't want to drink a lot before you go to bed. You know, if like I have a little bit of swelling my legs, I know that when I lay flat and take a nap or go to bed that my bladder will get full. So I need to make sure I don't drink a whole lot near the bladder part of the day. So you just have to think about those things when you do that. But it's a nice freedom. If you can take that medicine, catheterize on a regular basis, you know, it allows for, you know, some good independence that you may find that you like. Alright, well, that's it. Thank you for joining me today. If you have any comments or questions, please leave them below. You can send me an email at abilities at gmail.com. We're on Instagram and Twitter. So, you know, go ahead and follow us. Leave messages there, post pictures. And if you haven't done so already, please subscribe to the BILITY's channel. We'll be putting out more videos. And I thank you again for watching today and taking the time to let me show you how I use my close system for catheterization. Take care. Keep working hard on your independence. Thanks guys.