Erratic Stream

Edward is fifty-eight. He gets up four times a night to urinate. He has not told his wife. He has not told his GP. He has been carrying the silence for four years. He is not unusual. He is the median. Erratic Stream is the first book in Below the Belt: A Urologist's Storytelling, a series of twenty short books written by a consultant urologist who has spent twenty years in NHS clinic rooms watching men sit down opposite him and try to find the words. Twelve patients. One river. The Thames at Oxford runs past the consulting room window, and the book runs alongside it, patient by patient, scene by scene, through the territory most men know nothing about until they are in it. What the prostate is, and where it sits, and why it gives men trouble. The walk to the bathroom at three in the morning. The dribble that will not end. The pills, the surgery, the catheter in the suitcase, the conversations that do not get had at all. This is not a textbook. It is a book about men, written for the men and the women who love them. It explains the medicine clearly, accurately, and without lectures, through the stories of the patients who taught it to the author. By the last page, if it has done its job, the conversation will be easier to have than it was at the beginning. The river is still going past. So is the body. Take care of yours.