A Tale of IC

So, awhile ago, I wrote about my jerk faced bladder. After all kinds of horrific bladder-related tests, including the one where they put me under general anesthetic to fill up my bladder like a big festive balloon until it cracked, I was diagnosed with Interstitial Cystitis.

Interstitial Cystitis or IC, is basically punishment from Satan in the form of the feelings of a UTI (urinary tract infection) because your bladder lining is faulty, with none of the therapeutic possibilities of things like antibiotics or cranberry juice.  In fact, cranberry juice is one of the things that makes it worse.

When I first started feeling the effects of IC, I was guzzling cranberry juice like a person desperate not to have yet another UTI, which only made my bladder angrier and angrier.

And then, like a misunderstood teenager, it began to self-injure

Once I figured out that I probably had IC, two years before it was finally diagnosed, I immediately started an IC diet to try to appease the angsty beast that was living in my groin, and it worked pretty okay, though it was (and is) inconvenient.

Basically nothing with acid, sourness, caffeine or deliciousness.

But, I also found that certain medicines that I had been prescribed for other issues also tore the hell out of my bladder. At 4:45 on a Friday about a year ago, I found myself on the phone, pleading with my urologist's office to give me something to stop the bladder pain before I found a bridge to jump off during the weekend.

What I got worked well enough that I did not have to go out searching for appropriately tall bridges. It is a handy dandy pill that I dissolve under my tongue made from the root of the mandrake. Mandrake or mandragora, if you remember from Harry Potter, is a powerful restorative.  It is used to return people who have been transfigured or cursed, to their original state.

 Actually, wait, no, it is an antispasmodic drug that soothes the muscles, so, I guess it would work to unpetrify someone who had been petrified by a basilisk (spoilers, sorry), as well as someone who has ridiculous cramps in their bladder that makes them feel like they have to pee every 2 seconds.

I was also introduced to the "Bladder Cocktail" which is likely not as fancy as it sounds at all.

Basically, it is the most wonderful thing ever invented, surely sent from any god that might exist who doesn't like punishing people for having a bladder. It's a mixture of lidocaine and heparin that coats your bladder and numbs the crap out of your bladder wall.

Now, you are likely wondering, like I was when this was first described to me... so... you just pee on yourself? Somehow, this magical concoction from heaven doesn't affect your ability to feel a full bladder, it just stops all the pain associated with having pee in your bladder, which is part of the actual problem with Interstitial Cystitis.

Now, there is a drug to coat your bladder with magic that is on the market called Elmiron, and it works pretty nicely, but it does have side effects.  In my case, along with a bunch of other drugs, it beat the hell out of my liver and I ended up in the ER thinking I was dying of liver failure where I was advised to maybe stop taking pills that were killing my liver. It also beats up your stomach really badly because it is housed in a capsule made of pure evil, but switching it into a generic gelatin pill capsule is enough to combat that... but not if your liver isn't working.

So... I have a crappy bladder disease, and I am managing it with mandrake pills and emergency bladder cocktails when the disease flares beyond what I can control with diet, because I can't handle the pill that would make my life normal, which is part of why I decided to write this post; because right this very moment, my disease is flaring and my mandrake doesn't seem to be working so I called my doctor's office for my "you can come in any time, immediately, no problem, emergency bladder cocktail" and immediately, in this case, translates to "in 11 days." ELEVEN DAYS!!!!

So, I figured you should know what happened, just in case I can't find relief and need to find a suitably tall bridge before I can make it to next Thursday.

That Unfunny, Un-illustrated, TMI Post.

So, I have this medical procedure on Thursday morning that I have been waiting for for 4 months now, and I've hinted at it, but I haven't really written about it, mostly because I don't feel like illustrating it, and also because it is not terribly funny.

My bladder and its bad behavior has been a subject of this blarg before, and I have been waiting all this time for an appointment to have it looked at to make sure that the bad thing it is doing is not cancer.  This is honestly the first time that doctors have ever actually said to me, without my input, "Well, it could well be cancer. We're checking for bladder cancer."

(I'm going into details here so you might want to just skip to the bottom if you get squeamish...)

I am guessing it isn't. My hunch is that I have another chronic disease and that it isn't life threatening and will just be a painful annoyance for the rest of my life. Better, but not by a huge margin.

But they want to do more than just looking inside my bladder.  When I went to my first appointment with the urologist, the very nice nurse was tasked with catheterizing me to get an unadulterated sample of my pee to test it, once again, to make sure the problem wasn't an infection. She very kindly told me everything that she was doing before she even touched me.

She calmly let me know. "I'm inserting the catheter now. I'm not going to hurt you."
To which I laughed and replied "I think you're a damned liar!" because she was a damned liar and she scraped half the length of my urethra with the catheter. I peed a lot of blood for the rest of the day. It was like paying someone to give me the worst UTI of my life.
She was still a lovely person though. Then she exclaimed, "Your urethra is TINY! The doctor will dilate that for you when he does the cystoscope."
And I said, "Okay" because I didn't have access to the internet while I was in the office to find out exactly what "Urethral Dilation" entails.

Remember how freaked out I was at having my eyeballs touched?  Yeah, I am at least 600% less pleased about having graduated tubes inserted into my pee hole to make it bigger.  I figure it is just fine how it is.  She said it would help me pee better, but I think I have been peeing in an efficient and frequent manner for almost 36 years and I am of the opinion that they should leave well enough alone.

Also, everything I have read says that patients are usually put out for cystoscopes, yet, my doctor plans on doing it while I am completely awake and aware, and seeing as my guts betray me when I am nervous, and I have fibromyalgia, so my nerves are like super mega-ly more sensitive to pain than other people's, I am afraid that there is a chance that I am going to poop on the doctor. I would be afraid of kicking someone too, to stop the pain, because I am a kicker, but I have seen the table they are going to do the procedure on, and it has straps to immobilize my legs, which means they KNOW that I am going to want to kick them in the faces.

And I assume (but don't know if) they are going to somehow anesthetize the parts of my pee system that they will be futzing with, but OMG, what if they need to do biopsies!? I just want them to put me to sleep for this.

And then there is the bladder stretching, which might be on the docket also, because they made me measure my urinary habits with a pilgrim's hat, and it seems the most my bladder holds is 8-10 ounces, where the normal person's bladder holds double that. And I read that they sometimes do that to treat overactive bladder stuff... and I also read that some people who have had urethral dilation, and bladder stretching are in pain for the rest of their lives.

Anyway, I am not entirely sure what will happen to my bladder, and not knowing things I want to know stresses me out. Not knowing, for 4 months, whether the bleeding in my bladder is cancer has made me much less jovial and desirous of writing and illustrating. Though they keep trying to reschedule on me (it has been moved twice now- they tried to cancel again today, but agreed to just do it an hour and a half earlier- and I had to wait two months for my first visit knowing that my general practitioner wanted me seen right away, also concerned about cancer) I am hoping there will be some sort of KNOWN by the end of this week, and I can stop worrying all the time and go back to seeing funny things everywhere, all the time.

In all, this has been going on for almost a year, if not longer. I'm scared, and I'm nervous, and I don't want to endure more pain. I want my normal life back. I don't want to worry about this any more, so no matter how scared I am, I need to go through with it and get it over with so I can have an answer and start treating my stupid jerk bladder. But I am not looking forward to it, and it sucks, and I want to magically be better so I can go back to just being funny.


P.S. I want kittens and hamsters and goats to hug. I think that would make me feel better. Please send a petting zoo immediately.

Are You Experienced?

One of the crappiest things people can do, in my opinion, is insisting, when someone reports their personal experience, that said person with experience is clearly stupid/crazy/lying/in denial and is unaware of what is going on in their own life.

This applies to all sorts of experiences,
Like fat people who are told:

or writers of blargs who are told:
JUST STOP BEING DEPRESSED! YOU WON'T HURT IF YOU JUST GET OVER YOUR LIFE CRUSHING DEPRESSION!
Yeah. Not depressed.
DEPRESSION MANIFESTS IN COUNTLESS WAYS!
Does it ever manifest in being happy and content with your life, and being really motivated, because then maybe, yes, I am terribly depressed, but otherwise, NO, I AM NOT AND I AM GOING TO SHOVE A WAREHOUSE FULL OF TWINKIES UP YOUR BUTT IF YOU DON'T STOP TELLING ME I AM!

If someone is trying to tell you that your account of your own experience is wrong, or tries to assign feelings to you without really listening to you or even asking you how you feel, chances are, they are either trying to manipulate you, or they are an asshole.

After having been diagnosed with Fibromyalgia last week, I was sent to see a therapist yesterday to treat my "depression caused" Fibromyalgia. I willingly submitted to testing and answered questions on a little digital box to measure my sanity:

Er, does that count having to wake up to pee 10 times a night?
No. You have a reason for that, it means if you don't have a valid reason.
Okay, then no.

What? I don't abuse drugs at all! What the hell kind of question is this!? I don't think you can abuse a substance less than not doing them at all, unless I started doing nice things for drugs, like making them fancy dream houses with a working elevator or something?

False?

What's going on here? I mean they haven't in a while.

 Well, I guess true, now...


And after about 10 minutes, I had read and answered all of the questions to the best of my ability, since it asked many loaded questions along the line of "Have you stopped beating your wife? Y/N" What!? Wait! I don't even have a wife. Crap. This test should have been written by someone with a background in ambiguities.

And then the very lovely man who was assigned to talk to me plugged the test box into the the computer and a piece of paper issued from his printer with my results and after reviewing them, he said "As I am sure you are well aware, there is not a damned thing wrong with you psychologically." Which is what I have been saying to my doctors all along.

Pee Post

This pee post is nothing like the pudding post. For the record.

I want to know and understand the mechanism that makes me nearly pee on the bathroom floor every time I turn on the shower.  Theories are that it is operant conditioning, like Pavlov's dogs, but I have to wonder if it is the same mechanism that makes me dream of bathrooms to discourage me wetting the bed.
Am I the only one that has this? I have polled my friends in the past and it seems that  for the most part, men don't dream of bathrooms though some women do, I guess because guys have a built-in physical pee deterrent (morning wood, I mean... that is its purpose, no?).

But if you have no idea what I am talking about, here is a repeating feature of my dreams, nightly:

Crazy things happen.
Find a unicorn crafted from green banana peels.*
Kill a zombie cat who is actually one of my friends.*
Oh wait, I have to pee.
Hrm, is there a bathroom anywhere?
Oh, look, here is one, and then my brain presents me with a way to relieve myself, but there is always a hitch...

(click to biggify)

And so every night, I am treated to a new and novel variation (or four) of "trick bathrooms" to wake me up to go pee.


*I would like to reveal that these are both actual dreams that I had this week.