We try to work with the children and their parents. If it means that they will only do catheterization at home and not in school, we are comfortable with that in the beginning, but we will explain to the families why eventually catheterization needs to be done more often. If we can at least introduce the concept and get the children to begin to adhere to the program, even if it’s only twice a day in the beginning, we’ll accept that. We’ll try to gradually increase the frequency of catheterization to three times a day and ultimately to four times a day.

Stuart Bauer, MD, Department of Urology

When I sit and talk to a patient and counsel them about cathing, I take all these factors into consideration. I’m going to approach a male very differently from a female, and not from only an anatomical standpoint, but from a body image standpoint. Girls are much more body-conscious than boys are. Boys are more worried about pain, so that’s a little bit different. Girls are amazing in dealing with pain; that’s not what concerns them.

And then culturally, some parents are very accepting of abnormalities and of dealing with a child with special needs, while others just want to bury the problem, they don’t want to face it. They want to do everything possible to make it appear like there is no problem. All this just naturally comes into play, so that’s why my conversation with Hispanic parents who have a female needing catheterization will be very different from a Caucausian family who has a boy that needs catheterization.

Hiep Nguyen, MD, Department of Urology