Hi Danny
Picking up your thread from last year about intensive cycling and acute urinary retention – I'm a newbie here and hadn't seen it before.
I've had not dissimilar experiences twice now – intensive cycle-touring followed after a brief break by sudden acute retention. I'm pretty convinced from my own experiences that there is a link, though persuading urologists to take it seriously is probably a different matter.
First time, 3 years ago, two weeks' touring, 80 to 120 km per day fully laden, 5-7 hrs in the saddle daily. Peeing normally (for a 60+ y.o. with then-undiagnosed BPH!). Then maybe 5 days taking it easy, no cycling, during which urination became more and more difficult. Then the 6th day, acute retention that lasted for something like 36 very difficult hours, only relieved by going to A&E and being catheterised (and subsequently diagnosed with BPH).
Second time, 3 years on (during which period I'd toured without problem, thanks to meds, a nicely-reduced prostate, and a saddle with a cutout) – 5 days' intensive touring, averaging over 100km/day, then a day's uneventful break. 'Uneventful' that is, except that over a 4-hour period in the evening, I went from peeing normally to acute retention. This lasted the 30 hours it took me to get home, where I had a supply (from before) of DIY catheters to relieve myself.
As self-monitoring in the period between these events had suggested indirectly that my prostate had not re-grown significantly, and the second event came on so suddenly, I decided to delay seeking treatment in order to see if the problem cured itself – my hypothesis was that it was more the result of perineal nerve-damage, or something like that. Over 4 weeks with no cycling at all, self-catheterising twice a day for most of this time and monitoring the quantities voided, it became obvious that the bladder was retaining less and less, i.e. that it was returning to something like normal. After 4 weeks, there was no further need to catheterise – the problem appeared to have resolved itself. Only at this point did I restart medications (not as foolhardy as it will sound – I'd actually seen the doctor after 1 week, who organised blood-tests and an MRI scan and restarted my BPH prescriptions, but I held off starting the meds as I had an eye op in the interim, for which they are contra-indicated.)
So that's where I am. Like you, I'd love to find a urologist with specialist knowledge about the cycling connection, or at the very least open to learning from experiences like these. Did you get anywhere with that?