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During my three days as a twenty-five year old (days during which people have tried to tell me how young I still am), I have been to the urologist twice and have thrown my back out once. The next time someone tells me that I’m still young, Im’a cane-slap them. And then pour myself some prune juice and watch Matlock.

My first trip to the urologist was fruitful, educational, and painful. Finally I have someone in my life who not only understands my condition, but wants to help. I will be receiving treatment for interstitial cystitis. Treatment! Although I have spent my entire life adapting to this disease and learning how to deal with it, there are times when it gets the best of me. None of the therapies available ensure that I will not be in lots of pain many more times in my life. They do, however, offer me the feeling of being even marginally in control, which is really exciting.

The first treatment, which will begin next week, is pelvic floor therapy. The muscles around my bladder and throughout my pelvis are apparently extremely weak and tight. My doctor believes that some of these muscles share innervation with urologic structures, such that the ever-present tension in the muscles contributes to pain in the bladder and urethra. So I have to get physical therapy for those muscles to loosen then and make them stronger.

This problem is diagnosed during a pelvic exam, during which the doctor applies internal pressure to the bladder and various muscle groups. In a normal person, it’s not supposed to be painful. In me, the pain made me squirm and spasm on the exam table and felt like someone was breaking me apart from the inside. For reference, recall the scene in Terminator 2 when the T-1000 is chasing after the car and his arms turn into crowbars. After the exam, I felt like I had gone to third base with him, possibly while he was on a PCP-induced freakout. The exam lasted about one minute. The physical therapy will last forty minutes per session. Nonetheless, I am looking forward to it.

The second treatment will be self-administered bladder instillations, and this morning I met with a nurse practitioner for a demo session. She had an incredibly warm personality, which I appreciated as ten minutes after we met she was holding a mirror up to my womanhood so I could insert a catheter into my own urethra. I instilled a cocktail she had prepared of four different medications to soothe my bladder. She sent me on my way with a handful of prescriptions, a numb bladder, and a sense of victory.

Obtaining some of the medical supplies I will need is proving to be a minor challenge, as was finding a physical therapist who specializes in pelvic floor treatment and didn’t have a multi-month long waiting list. I couldn’t be happier, though. These treatments were always out there, but due to a combination of ignorant doctors and my own apathy, I never felt that they could be a reality for me. Though it was initially pursued out of agony and desperation, forming a relationship with this new urologist and getting treatment is one of the most mature things I’ve ever done, so I guess it’s fitting that it began on my birthday.

The best part, though, is that performing self-catheterization is totally bad-ass, and the notion of it will probably horrify my ridiculously squeamish friends more than anything else I’ve ever done.

Today I continue my descent into decrepitude and celebrate my 25th birthday. I decided to kick off the morning with a trip to the urologist, where I entered a world of pain via a surprise catheterization and an exploration of the highly dysfunctional muscles of my pelvic floor. Happy birthday to me!

I’d like to extend a shout-out to this girl and this guy, with whom I share the deep and sacred bond that only birthday buddies can truly understand. May your birthdays be filled with joy and devoid of any invasive urogynecological procedures.

A few years ago, Jared and I signed up for Netflix and enjoyed its services for some time. We had the “two movies at once” option and, at first, availed ourselves of their vast selection quite happily. Gradually we became lazier about sending movies back after we watched them, thus frequently leaving ourselves with nothing new to watch. In those instances we would sometimes go to the video store and stop using Netflix for weeks at a time, which is financially nonsensical. We canceled the service. Some time later, we found ourselves lamenting the experience of driving to the video store, walking around for twenty minutes unable to find anything good, and then paying late fees. We hemmed and hawed, but the choice was clear. Our problems with our prior Netflix experience had been pure user error, and we knew it.

We signed up again earlier this week, this time choosing the “three movies at a time” option and dividing that between two personal queues. I decided to start things off with a bang and chose The Unbearable Lightness of Being and Blade Runner as my first rentals, never having seen either before.

As for the former, I thought it was worth viewing, though I found the underlying philosophy to be a load of crap, and was distracted by Daniel Day-Lewis’s gigantic JFK Jr hairstyle. I was greatly titillated by his first sexual encounter with Juliette Binoche’s character, in which he gives her a physical exam by peering into her mouth and pressing his ear against her back to hear her lungs. The scene quickly deteriorated into some slapsticky pants-around-the-ankles silliness, which annoyed me. Few of the characters aroused my sympathy, but I did greatly enjoy the film from a visual perspective. Binoche being caught in the nude by a stranger and backing up into a wall of mirrors, then shrieking at the sight of her reflected ass; DDL hopping across a room on his hands while Binoche holds his feet and teases him for being jealous. Fantastic direction and acting all around. I am not really interested in reading the book.

As for the latter, I’m pleased to finally be in on all those catch-phrases Jared and his friends are always quoting. There’s a lot to like in Blade Runner, though it’s hard to cram so much story and and so many dystopian themes into a feature-length film. I wonder if it would have worked better as a trilogy or mini-series, though perhaps the issue is that it necessitates several viewings to be properly enjoyed. The movie was nearly crushed under the weight of its pseudo-futuristic 80’s hairstyles and makeup techniques, but you can’t fault people for trying. Also, I hope that when I die I’ll go out crashing through a series of glass partitions while wearing a clear plastic raincoat and being shot by Harrison Ford.

Based on these first results of our reunion with Netflix, I think we’re going to make it work this time around.

I have a urology appointment coming up, and the office sent me a packet of forms to fill out before I arrive (medical history, insurance info, etc). This particular practice specializes in urogynecology, and they give the same forms to each patient, so most of the information they’re asking for is humorously unrelated to my condition. Here are some of the questions for which I happily checked “no”:

-Do you lose urine during sex?

-Do you ever wet the bed?

-Do you have a sense of your pelvic organs “falling out”?

-Do you notice anything protruding from the vagina?

-Do you have a sense of “bulging” from the vagina?

-Are you incontinent of stool?

Last night I dreamed that two of my friends had just had a baby (to avoid freaking them out I won’t mention their names, but they rhyme with Wecca and Bill). Naturally, the day after the birth I met up with them and we flew to Europe. I’m not sure which country but it had a lot of “ch” sounds in the name. I was babysitting and took the infant up to the rooftop of our hotel. From there, I could see the tops of other buildings and noted that there were people standing on many of them, all looking in one direction. In the distance, a comically sinister government official was decreeing from his own rooftop that any of us who were sympathetic to the dissident political scholar who had just reached the city would be considered enemies of the state and treated accordingly. Suddenly everyone turned towards me, instantly incriminating me. The man from the government pointed something at me, and though he was far away I felt incredibly exposed. I put the baby down gently and started to flee. Wecca appeared and discovered that in my panic I had put a sheet of plastic wrap over her baby’s face; she peeled it back and the baby was alive but had clearly been brain damaged. I urged her to start moving, and we climbed down a ladder to the street. Wecca then noticed an old friend of hers and they fell into conversation–in a bit of typical dreamworld non-sequitur, Wecca described herself as being from our hometown, but in a different state–and I anxiously turned around and around, waiting to be arrested and hauled away, or shot, or worse.

Roughly two years later, I am still quite proud of my epic video production which I made by my own self.  It has brought laughter to the hearts of tens.

I awoke early this morning just as the light was starting to come in, having had a terrible nightmare involving travel to a Carribbean locale where terrorists cut off three of Jared’s limbs and tied the rest of him to a pole in the sand.  (Even describing it gives me an awful feeling).  There was more to it, something about girls neither of us knew and the possibility that the terrorists would return to rape and murder me, but none of that really approached the total horror of the first part of the dream.  When I woke up, a snowstorm was underway, work had been called off, and I was still tired.  Afraid to return to the land of Nod, I lay still in bed for a long time.

I’m doing much better bladder-wise; I’ve missed no work this week, made it to the gym, and have been consuming acidic beverages (coffee, o coffee!) with wild abandon. The trick is to drink a shot of baking soda and water first: it tastes vile but is surprisingly effective.

High on relatively pain-free life, I committed a common blunder yesterday. Roughly once a month I foolishly leave one of the drawers of a desk at work open and then stand up and bash my knee into it. I did this yesterday with an unusual amount of force, and the resulting sensation caused the edges of my visual field to creep towards one another, and produced an instant and enduring nausea. It was pretty fascinating. Every time I do this I think, this is the time my kneecap is going to snap clean out of place and shoot up into my thigh. Of note, I would rather feel that pain once or twice a day than have my bladder pain once a week. (Also of note, I’ve tried to employ the “gate control” theory by inducing pain elsewhere in my body to prevent transmission of nasty bladder sensations to my brain; it doesn’t really work. Perhaps I need to gouge harder!)

In other news, to help mourn my upcoming birthday and continued descent into old-baggery, Jared has given me a camera much fancier and better than I deserve. Be on the lookout for a very slight increase in quality on my flickr site.

Things continue to fucking suck around here, though I’m in pretty good spirits at the moment. My urine result came back negative for bacteria but contained “a massive amount of white blood cells, there’s no mistaking that!” according to my doctor. This means I don’t have an infection, but there is a significant inflammatory process going onside my bladder due to my condition. It hurts an awful lot. I fell asleep last night with a ziplock bag full of ice in my pants. I feel pretty!

I got referred to a new urologist but they didn’t have any openings until my birthday (the end of the month) which at first seemed tolerable because my pain was backing off a little…but now it’s getting all pushy and pissy again, so I’m thinking I’ll need to make some calls in the morning and beg for/demand faster service. I hate being a crybaby because some part of me feels like I deserve to be in pain for all the times I’ve been lazy and lame in my life when I could have been productive. I also have a really fucked-up relationship to the sick role due to being sick as a kid and learning how good it feels to be taken care of. I admit it. Intellectually, though, I know I need to get my pain under control. Less intellectually, it fucking hurts and I’d like for it stop hurting.

My current pain management technique involves drinking lots of water and listening to ELO on headphones. It’s better than nothing!

As I’ve mentioned before, I have a condition called interstitial cystitis. Essentially this causes the symptoms of a urinary tract infection in the absence of actual bacterial invasion; instead, the intermittent burning, urgency, and general searing misery are thought to be caused by some autoimmune reaction that destroys the inner lining of the bladder and urethra. As far as I can remember, I’ve had this my whole life, or at least since the bladder surgery I had at age six. For many, many years I didn’t know what it was and assumed that it was normal. I would occasionally mention it to my pediatrician, who was patently disinterested. Eventually I grew up, did some research, deduced what my problem was and saw several urologists who had no idea what I was talking about, and finally one who did. I was diagnosed via an interesting procedure in which I was catheterized and a caustic solution was instilled into my bladder; the point of the procedure was that in a normal person, this would not cause pain. In a person with IC, it would. And, lo, it did!

There is no real definitive treatment but I’ve learned to deal with the symptoms in a variety of ways. Avoiding certain foods, drinking tons of water, icing my crotch: the usual routine. I’ve refused a variety of medications and “pelvic floor therapy” (which is physical therapy that takes place inside your vagina) out of futility and the fact that, anecdotally, they don’t really help. Sometimes the pain gets overwhelming and I’m essentially rendered useless. I’ve lost of a lot of time from my life to this bullshit, time spent doubled over in bed or crying on the toilet, missing work, missing school, missing out on everything. A couple of years ago, my IC went into a semi-remission. I still got symptoms from time to time, but much less frequently and with much less severity: I was in mild to moderate pain maybe once or a few times a week instead of intense pain most days of the week.

Three days ago my remission went into remission. I woke up at four in the morning in an unbelievable state, and suffered in burning misery for a few hours until the pain died down such that I was able to stand up and walk around. I dropped off a urine sample at the doctor’s office just in case (sometimes I can’t tell if I have an infection because the condition so closely mimics a UTI). The next day I did much better, with some pain off and on, but was able to go to a friend’s birthday party and enjoy myself. Then I woke up this morning and was in agony once again. Jared went to the pharmacy to get me some bladder anesthetic/snake oil which has the curious side effect of turning pee a bright, garish orange color. It dulled my pain enough that by the afternoon I was able to get up and take a shower. It was pretty awesome.

Some people have it so, so much worse than me. I’ve had it worse than I have it right now. I’m nauseas and exhausted, but I cannot quite describe the elation and ecstasy that come from the absence of pain. When I hurt I just want to feel nothing. Nothing is incredible. I’m sure in a few days this flare-up will pass, or maybe the doctor will call and tell me I have an infection after all, and I’ll get some medicine. Either way, I hope that when sustained relief comes I will meet it with renewed productivity and zest. I’ve been doing well for so long that I almost forgot what it was like to spend entire days in a tug-of-war with my body, but because I’m either an optimist (unlikely) or an idiot (more likely) I feel some gratitude for my condition: it reminds me how lucky I am.