I get ANOTHER bladder infection. It’s 2:00 in the morning and it looks like I’m getting an all-nighter instead of turtle doves.

I am starting to freak again this might be the family disease. (Update: it was!)

I’ll never forget the horrible time my mother went through 15 years ago when nobody really knew anything about it. She was working at the time, and was barely able to hold down her job. She would race home every lunch hour, take a hot bath, and then race back to work. I don’t think it helped much. But there was hardly any resources or suggestions back then (no internet, either), and doctors pretty much just told you to take a bath, drink some cranberry juice, and hung up on you. How she made it through the day I don’t know. Meanwhile I was fourteen or fifteen, and probably not as sympathetic as I could have been. I’d get home from school and complain about all the things teenagers complain about, and she had no energy for it, and I would complain about that too, and then she would start crying hysterically. I remember on one occasion she began screaming about the pain she was in and about suicide.

There was a lot of screaming going on in general in our house, all the time, so it was hard for my sister and I to sort out what was really happening sometimes. To say our domestic situation was a mess would be an understatement. But I’ve never forgotten that particular moment–I think that’s when it really hit me that IC is serious business. Bad enough to make you think about killing yourself.

It’s treatable though, and both my mom and my sister are doing okay with it. But it frightens me nonetheless. Depending on the kind of case you have, you have to eliminate a lot of the food and activities that make life kind of, you know, fun. [Sigh].

My mom asked me to participate in a new study on the disease about six months ago, and I did. The brochure for the study has the little man and woman symbols like you see on restroom doors, with a red, inflamed spot where the bladder would be and big unhappy frowns.

This is me now.

The twin sleeping-through record finally began to falter tonight also–Saige has woken up distressed twice now. Though not screaming her head off, at least (a big improvement). So the question is, is this just because she decided to skip her nap today, or is it the “I’m going to wake up two or three times a night every night for months and drive you insane” thing coming back…?

Impeccable timing!

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Snailers
LeftyBlogs
Cheap LCD panels (they do sell out very quickly)
Open letter to the Kansas school board from the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (thanks Anne!)
“I hope your genitals fall off and are eaten by three-legged mice with squirrel tails.” - oh, and they get some cool hate mail, as you might expect