I’m a woman (so not sure if men experience this too) and sometimes I just pee the 1st time and sit there and browse on my phone. But then I am able to try again and have small bursts of pee the 2nd time. Sometimes if I wait a few minutes more, I can pee a bit the 3rd time! Once a nurse told me to empty my bladder for an ultrasound but specifically instructed me to wait a few mins to pee the 2nd time to make sure my bladder is for sure empty.
Why can’t our bladder empty out on the first try?
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The kidneys are constantly filtering your blood. Something like 190 liters per day. They’re kind of a greedy organ. Most of that water gets reabsorbed, but some of it is excreted as urine. If you sit on the toilet long enough, your kidneys send more urine to your bladder. Also, the bladder typically has some retained urine, even if you think you’ve completely voided all the urine. Something like 50 mL could be left in the bladder. It has to do with the muscles involved with voiding the bladder.
Edit: fixed 190 mL to 190 liters per day.
Some urine is being processed in the kidneys – that could drain down and put more urine in the bladder so you can pee.
It’s not a good idea to do this. You can get a urinary tract infection. The downside of phone use on the can. At least that’s what my doctor told me last time I had one.
Let’s say you’ve got a gallon of milk in the refrigerator, and there’s a tiny hole in the bottom of the jug, so you put a cup underneath the jug to catch the milk that’s spilling out. The cup fills up, so you empty it and put it back—and eventually, it’ll fill up again, even though you haven’t added more milk to the fridge since you last emptied the cup!
In this metaphor, your body is the fridge, your bladder is the cup, and your milk jug is the route water takes from your digestive system through the rest of your body’s organs and other systems prior to its arrival in your bladder.
For older women in particular there is also a problem that occurs when the bladder relaxes as it is being emptied, the top part can fold over a bit and hold a portion of the urine which will drop back down to the bottom of the bladder after it has been emptied and it relaxes back to a smaller state. In addition to this, urine can back up in the ureters/kidney so if you hold it too long, you just end up with a backlog, so to speak.
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