Improving the Latex Catheter


Charles T. Tart of Palo Alto, California, has found a nice trick for dulling the knife edges on plastic catheters. He sends a couple of photos and a catheter improvement to share. Here is his description:

My improvement of latex catheters ... Those damn right-angle edges, like knives, as you say. So I got a soldering iron with a round barrel, the cheapest type, heat it for a while – not maximum - and then roll the round barrel back and forth a few times over the openings, which melts them into a much smoother shape! Takes a little practice to do this lightly enough to get the smoothing effect without melting through, but then you have a huge improvement over the standard right angle hole.

OK, I tried taking pictures with a 10 power computer microscope. ... - sold as a kid's toy, actually, by Intel a few years ago, but works quite well. Higher powers available too. I'll attach the two pictures, but I don't think they illustrate the differences as well as I'd like.

The nice clean one, where hopefully the hole edges look pretty sharp, is a plastic #10, colored brown by the manufacturer - to make it look like latex? I can't melt those, they melt irregularly and you end up with sharper edges than the original! And I speak from direct "bio-assay," as it were, it's like inserting some kind of special torture instrument with little sharp barbs!

So then I tried using a little Dremel Mototool that my wife gave me for a birthday years ago, a miniature grindstone whirling at hundreds, if not thousands of RPM, and visually it seems to let me grind the edges to more smoothness, but it felt just as bad on insertion, so I've given up on that. Maybe it illustrates right angles, but, as I say, they don't look as sharp in this photo as I know they are.

The second photo is a latex, # 14, Baird French coudet tip, that I melted the edges definitely smoother, with my soldering iron, both by visual inspection and bio-assay. In the photo, though, while the edges do look more rounded, all sorts of color discolorations from the melting process appear, and, to me, it looks like an example of some sort of horrible diseases catheters can get….. ;-)

But it feels enormously better than the factory edges. If I hadn't gotten so sensitive at the prostate these last few weeks I'd be happily using this with no complaints. My urologist, nice fellow that he is, doesn't seem to have anything to say when I talk about something swelling the urethra at the prostate or the prostate itself, like they don't understand this. Well perhaps they don't…. Meanwhile it's not as painful as it was, so maybe I'll stand it for the time being and hope the TURP I get in a few weeks makes things better.

Feel free to post this on your site or wherever it you want. If knowing how to melt those edges smoother helps even one person experience less pain - I know the medical folks would want me to say "discomfort" rather than "pain" - then it's all worth while. Credit? Well it strikes me as quite humorous in a fashion that I might be remembered by my urethra instead of just all that psychology stuff…. ;-)


(Dr. Tart is a renowned professor of psychology, and is poking fun at himself here.)

I've mentioned several times to my doctor and his nurses, e.g., that I have a better technique for clean catheterization than they taught me. Theirs is great if you have a nice clean, dry counter to work on, but then there's those dirty gas station bathrooms….. And none has ever asked me, "What is your technique." Oh well. They're good human beings and mean well, just as caught up in their own stuff as we all are.


Another thing Charles shares is about reusing, cleaning, storing. I cited various references from the medical community indicating simple cleaning is acceptable, and that single use (as in a hospital setting) is not really indicated for general personnal application. But for those who do have concerns about sterile conditions, Charles offers a brilliant method. Here is his description:

I coil my latex catheter up in a wide-mouthed bottle of rubbing alcohol in between uses and so one catheter can last a year or more. It's important to dry it off and drain it before use, of course, you don't want alcohol in the urethra drying out the flesh.

Charles T. Tart