today.

can i be frank with you, dear readers? okay thanks. because there is no other way to tell this story. there's no skirting around the terms and the facts. the procedure i had done today involved a catheter, three different types of solutions and my bladder. it also involved a very pensive, nervous me, a nurse practitioner and lots of lydocaine jelly.

the goal was to see if my bladder could tell the difference between a regular water solution and a solution that contained potassium. it's one of the tests they do to confirm or rule out IC, the condition they believe i have. yep, to confirm this problem, they have to induce pain. this is why i was so worried. i also didn't want to be able to feel the potassium. i wanted to think it was water. i wanted to be okay and not sick from this stupid problem. hence, the scared post from yesterday.

when the nurse put the catheter in, it hurt. a lot. i imagine it was close to the sensation a female cat feels while mating. (i've heard that the male cat's "thing" has spikes on it. and that's why the female cat cries during mating.) wow, i just realized i'm not sure if that's a fact or not. but anyway, let's just say i felt like a knife was in my urethra. lovely, no?

so hooray for me, i couldn't tell a huge difference between the solutions. the most pain and discomfort i had was from the catheter, not from the solutions. this is a very good sign. i may now only have one problem instead of two. but we won't know for sure until february 5th.

but getting on with the pain of my day, the last solution they put into my poor, defenseless bladder was a cocktail of sorts. it contained a steroid and a numbing thing and then something to help my irritated bladder wall heal. they told me i needed to be sure to urinate out this cocktail in four hours. i said, "no problem." and then, they sent me on my way.

four hours later, i neither felt the need to urinate nor could i urinate. um,i usually have to go every few hours. and i'd had a ton of coffee, four glasses of water and this freaked me out. a lot. i was panicked. i left multiple messages with the nurse. i got on this message board for IC patients where people told me it was an urgent situation that needed attention. now. not later. so, i was driven back to the doctor.

and um, when i got there, they told me this was normal. NORMAL. not being able to pee is a NORMAL reaction to this cocktail. i shouldn't worry. i should take a warm bath or something and just relax. ha. i wonder if i sounded pissed off when i told them they should've let me know that BEFORE sending me on my merry way.

so, that was my day. good news that i didn't react terribly to the potassium. good news that my bladder still functions. but, man, this thing is stressful.

thanks for reading. and i hope you all still like me.
(it's not every day a 28-year-old has bladder issues.)