u/Objective_Horror_486

Hi everyone,

So I’m not a primary caregiver, I’m just trying to spend time with my dad during his illness. My dad has kidney failure after a mental health problem that caused him to be afraid of leaving the house or leaving the room, which caused inability to get help with an enlarged prostate, which caused a urine back up, which caused kidney failure. so at this point, he’s a very ill man who can’t walk very much, only from his chair to the bathroom, due to swollen feet, and he urinate a lot during the day because his prostate is so enlarged he can’t fully vacate his bladder. He’s able to go to the bathroom for bowel movements but for urine because it’s so common during the day, he just urinates into cups that he puts on his desk shelf. And then at the end of the day either he or my mom pours that into plastic jugs that are than discarded. So if I visit him during the day, there’s just many many plastic cups of urine open plastic cups of urine on the shelf above his desk there. For me the smell is overwhelming and I gag and I can’t handle it. So when I visit him, I kind of sit a little bit outside the room and try to avoid the smell. I’ve thought about talking to him about it, but my mom says that it would make him feel bad. He doesn’t wanna have an internal catheter, even though it could help his kidneys, this was a whole thing.

I wonder if anyone has any advice about how a person might talk about this or would you talk about this? From reading the Reddit I see a lot of people are doing dealing with urine smells, but I wonder it’s not the same perhaps as open cups of urine- or maybe it is?. Maybe I should just get over it and try to talk to him about it and not worry about making him feel bad. Sorry if this is not the right Reddit for this as this is not a real caretaker question perhaps.

My only motivation is that I could spend more time with him and sit next to him if the smell was not so terrible. But I guess it is hurtful to be told this smell is terrible?

My mom says – just breathe through your mouth. I can’t seem to do it!

How do home healthcare workers deal with this? Do you think they would work in that kind of environment? Or would they insist on cleaning up Or doing it differently?

OK quick backstory - I moved countries a couple of months ago. I got some type of food poisoning. Since then, I feel like I have gas and burping. It went away when I had a very bland diet and then it escalated when had many chocolate almonds right before intense exercise and I had some type of terrible stomach pain attack and I had to go to the ER and they said everything is fine with organs so Go get checked out for an ulcer. So I have an gastro appointment I’m waiting.

since then, the intense gas and burping has recurred. The pain is gone, but just burping. And I’ve been trying to figure it out because it doesn’t make sense that I had no gas while I was on my bland diet and now I have tons of gas and burping after the stomach pain attack— the gut Bacteria didn’t radically change in three days. So what could it be? And every time I ask an AI about it says well it can be supragastric burping and I always thought no no I’m not swallowing air. But finally, I had the AI explain it to me — how we learned this habit because at one point we really do need to burp, and we somehow unconsciously learn how to open our upper esophagus sphincter, and that causes us to swallow air and produce the burp, even when there’s no gas coming from the stomach. and it explain how diaphragmatic breathing can solve it and I’m doing the diaphragmatic breathing and the burping is gone. I’m shocked! the ai laid out all the physiology and it explained how hypervigilance and some underlying gut issue all kind of prolong it— as a maladaptive learned behavior. so it means that it’s not that I don’t have some underlying gut issue whatever it is, something caused this pain attack, but that plus hypervigilance caused this learned unhelpful solution, which is basically swallowing air to produce a burp without being conscious of it. like a motor tic- jaw grinding or something.

so It was amazing. I’m just shocked. my evening was governed by burping and now I just have a little bit of underlying tightness and discomfort, but I’m doing the diaphragmatic breathing and at least now there’s no burping. The AI says that once you start to do the diaphragmatic breathing breathing and stop burping, it takes a while before you feel normal, you’ll feel this kind of built-up pressure because your nerves got accommodated.

I’m still gonna go to the gastro doc, have careful diet and slowly reintroduce, take my Herbal teas blah blah blah. but I’ve been reading post after post here about the burping and I really think there might be something to the burping as a learned motor habit that can be relieved by diaphragmatic breathing. just wanted to share that in case anyone else is searching for burping relief!

since then found an interesting pubmed article reviewing diaphragmatic breathing for gerd: it mentions 1 study where 80% patients taught the breathing could cease ppi use; another study where 80% patients with belching ceasedafter breathing taught. gives a great diagram too- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9888515/

quotes here-

"Sun et al. [32] investigated the effectiveness of diaphragm biofeedback training in 40 patients with GERD, in short-term and long-term follow-up. Patients were randomized to receive breathing exercises and PPI treatment (rabeprazole), or rabeprazole alone. The diaphragm biofeedback training/rabeprazole group showed significant improvement in reflux symptoms and EGJ pressure after 8 weeks compared to baseline values. Acid suppressing drug use significantly decreased at the 6-month mark, where 82% of patients in the study group (diaphragm biofeedback training/rabeprazole) had ceased PPI use after breathing exercises, while only 6.2% of patients in the control group (rabeprazole only) had ceased PPI use.

In a study by Ong et al. [33], the effect of diaphragmatic breathing was assessed in GERD patients who exhibited a dominant symptom of supragastric belching. Fifteen patients were enrolled in the training group, while 21 controls were placed on a waitlist. Patients underwent four weekly sessions over a period of 4 weeks. After training, 80% of participants in the treatment group, compared to only 19% of participants in the control group, had a significantly reduced belching frequency, measured via a Visual Analog Scale score. Reflux symptoms and QoL scores also significantly increased in training group, and these changes were sustained 4 months post treatment."

edit- im a day out and doing a lot of the diaphragmatic breathing and no gas at all. After days of gas.. Tummy feels less tight as well. feels like a miracle

Advice about dads urine cups

burping perhaps really behavioral?!