Pee Envy

I am starting to suffer from pee envy. It’s a condition I either developed or became fully aware of yesterday.

See, I was in the bathroom stall at the hospital, needing desperately to pee for the second time in less than five minutes, when, presumably, a woman entered the stall next to me. In the time it was taking me to line the seat (again) with toilet paper and sit down, the woman next to me was already getting down to business.

As I paused to consider whether or not she had taken the time to line the seat before plopping her ass down on a much used seat, my urgent need to pee was, for a millisecond, outwitted by my deep pondering. My deep pondering was interrupted by the noises that issued forth in the stall next to me.

As I sat, impatiently trying to wait patiently for my urine to spew forth, there was an active geyser jettisoning its way into the toilet next to me. I was aghast. I was stunned. I wondered what the hell was going on over there! The woman seemed to be peeing as if her very life-force depended upon it…as if she drank an entire pot of coffee mere moments ago…as if she was trying to disgorge something in time for a drug test…as if she weren’t human.

I was still sitting there, waiting, waiting, waiting for my “urgent pee” to come out and this woman must have pumped a gallon or more of liquid into her throne. I say liquid because the sound lasted for so long that I began to doubt it was really a human being urinating next door. Perhaps it was just someone pouring out all the leftover stale beverages from the holidays…into the toilet…when it would have been so much easier to empty it all out in the sink. I thought about looking under the wall, you know, quickly and inquisitively like you did when you were a kid, but at 32 I felt too old to risk the reaction I might get.

Then I considered that maybe there was a horse in the stall next to me, which would obviously explain the ferocity with which urine was pummeling the toilet. Again, I resisted the urge to stick my head under the partition and instead, I surreptitiously surveyed the floor next to me, in case it was a horse, not a woman, making all that ruckus. To my dismay, I only saw two feet when I was hoping to see four hooves.

I know that this might sound utterly ridiculous, looking for horses in a hospital bathroom, but hey, it may have happened somewhere! Yet what it really came down to was a realization that smacked me between the eyes as my own urine trickle, trickle, drop, dropped out. I was jealous! I was insanely jealous of the ability of the person next to me to urinate freely and with such force she could probably propel herself into another universe if she tried not to pee at all during an 8 hour work day. I was jealous of the fact that she was out of the stall and washing her hands as I, who got there before her, was still trying to coax more urine from my bladder. I was jealous that she doesn’t pee like someone who has IC, and truth be told, her ability to do so, made me want to cry about my own inadequate urinating abilities.

I know I wrote recently about the things I was grateful for, but right now, I’m having a relapse. Mentally I am forgetting the brief feeling of relief I had when my pains had names and treatment options. And physically, for reasons I cannot figure out, I seem to be “flaring up” as bad, or worse than I was before I started all my treatments.

Now, having the powerful, “I will stomp on small children and elderly ladies in the way of my getting to the bathroom” need to pee after physical therapy doesn’t surprise me too much, I just didn’t think it would last ALL DAY! And even that doesn’t explain why, seemingly within the last week or so, I feel the need to pee far more often and produce far less urine. I’ve been, with the exception of chocolate, ridiculously good about trying to stay away from any “problem foods”, even over the holidays. And even if I did have three glasses of Sauvignon Blanc on New Year’s Eve (and I took my Prelief!) it shouldn’t be causing a “flare-up” so many days later!

I’m getting sick of writing down everything I eat and drink (which is only water and milk and I think milk is gross!) and when I pee and when I shit and how I feel when I feel it. I’m getting sick of watching what I eat and still seeing my weight go up. I’m getting sick of feeling ridiculously strong urges to pee and not being able to fill a thimble, or even better yet, feeling like my clitoral hood and/or urethra is being sliced apart with razor blades when I finally dribble something out. I am no longer amused by the AZO Standard (over-the-counter pyridium) I take before my bladder instillations which turn my urine Easter egg shades of yellow and orange…as well as my underwear if I forget to wear dark colored ones and our white sheets too!

I don’t mind the oral medicine so much, even when the Elmiron lodges in the back of my throat like stifling cum, but that is probably because I haven’t noticed any hair loss, or other unpleasant side effects which may occur. Nor have I noticed any marked improvement, but I was warned that could take 3 to 6 months and I have only been popping those babies for a month or so.

I am beginning to loath the bladder instillations. Even as much as I like the nurse who does them, there is NOTHING FUN about having a catheter shoved in your urethra and to do that for 9 weeks in a row is beyond madness, it might even qualify as a form of torture! Another nifty thing about BIs is that when the catheter is removed, and I am finally allowed to pee, I almost always produce a profusion of air bubbles which make me feel like I am farting from the wrong place. Sometimes those air bubbles hang around for many feeble urinations afterwards.

During my last BI, as they are called in the office, the nurse suggested that it was possible that the IC spread into my urethra and the treatments that were supposed to make me better (the BIs) might be causing me more pain. So, I stopped going for several weeks over the holidays because my urethra hurt and burned and felt fingered by Freddy Kruger so much that air, never mind underwear, was causing me intense pain. Everything hurt that area…sitting down, laying down, standing up, walking with my feet as far apart as possible, being naked. Everything.

I am often frustrated and disgusted. I feel like one treatment option exacerbates something else. Sure, I could stop the BIs and continue with the Elmiron, but realistically I couldn’t stop urinating, no matter how painful it may be. And as much as I love to be naked, it is too fucking cold to be tottering, legs wide apart, throughout our house and I am too damn cheap to pump the heat into the 80’s so I would be more comfortable naked. And it never occurred to me how much I envy some people’s ability to urinate until yesterday, until the full reality that I really do have a problem, finally sunk in.

Today alone, I have peed 16 times. Sixteen times and it is only 8:30 at night! If I were able to collect all the urine I produced in one day, I sincerely doubt it would fill a pint glass (which is what the woman next to me yesterday was able to produce each millisecond!!). I used to think my urge and frequency was normal, but now that I know it is not, it is really fucking with my life. A few weeks ago I thought I was getting better. Now I feel like I am just getting better at peeing through the pain.