Urinary Retention

Urinary retention can have causes that aren’t due to underlying disease. Examples include holding in urine intentionally or medication side effects.
Urinary retention is a condition where your bladder doesn’t empty all the way or at all when you urinate. Your bladder is like a storage tank for urine. Urine is made up of waste that’s filtered out of your blood by your kidneys. Once filtered, the urine moves to your bladder where it waits till it’s time to move through the urethra and out of the body.
When you have urinary retention, it can be acute (sudden) or chronic (long-term). Acute means that it comes on quickly and it could be severe. Chronic urinary retention means that you’ve had the condition for a longer period of time.