The Last Two Weeks

Sorry we've been so quiet. I've really been having a hard time. About 2 weeks ago a bad flare started and I was heavily bleeding from my bladder. This caused me a lot of increased pain but last week was one of the hardest weeks I've had in a while. For 4 days straight I was completely incontinent. It was so miserable. So of course this meant that I had to cath.

When you have IC you're going to the bathroom every 30 minutes but when you have to catheterize yourself you can't do it that often. This brought on a lot of frustration and pain in itself. I'm used to going to the bathroom and instead I had to wait a few hours in-between each time I cath which caused so much pain and pressure in my bladder. Ouch!

Ok well that's not the worst of it. The worst part of the whole thing was that we ran out of our normal rubber catheters we use so we used these other short plastic ones instead. The first time it worked fine, but the second time something terrible happened. Because I was so swollen this plastic cath decides it wants to latch on to my insides and never let go! Oh my gosh I cannot tell you how badly this hurt. I screamed and cried more than I ever have in my entire life. The way I described it to my husband was as if someone had taken a surgical clamp and clamped it to the inside of my bladder or urethra and then started pulling. It literally would not come off. I guess what had happened was the swelling on the inside had nowhere to go when the catheter was in there so it went into the holes of the catheter tip. I tried to just slowly inch the catheter out but it wouldn't let go of my bladder and plus it made me scream bloody murder so I had no other choice than to yank it out. I did it in a short but fast motion and it finally let go. When I handed the catheter to my husband it was filled with bright red blood. I was already crying because of this stupid plastic catheter that just cut my insides. Needless to say this went on for 2 more days while we were waiting for our supplies to be delivered.

On the 4th day my pharmacy said they do not take our new insurance so Rich went out to the regular pharmacy and just paid cash for some catheters until we could get the correct order in. I was relieved to have the right catheters but still nervous because I felt like I had been tortured over the last few days. I mean I have an open wound inside me and it just kept getting reinjured after every catheter use. The first time I used the rubber catheter after I got cut it felt horrible. Yes, it didn't cut me like the plastic one did but since it was rubber when it touched the wound it irritated it. It felt like someone had poured rubbing alcohol or lemon juice on the wound. I was not happy. Luckily the next day I was finally able to go to the bathroom on my own and I have been able to since.

I'm still in a lot of pain and now trying to recover from last week. I was working on another post about my IC background when all of this happened. So I will be posting that hopefully in the next couple of days. Thank you all for the positivity and support for us and our blog. I know a lot of our readers also suffer from IC and we hope that you know you are not alone in this.