heyatleastitsnotcancer:

Interstitial cystitis is a bladder and pelvic floor condition. It’s painful, exhausting, embarrassing, and complicated. It makes peeing painful. Makes sex painful. Even makes just sitting or laying down painful. You have frequent urination and utis, urinary retention, bladder spasms, and so many more horrible symptoms. I.C. patients are 90% women, 10% men.

Doctors can literally feel your pelvic muscles twitching and spasming all the time. Often the treatment is physical therapy where a therapist has to stick their fingers inside your vagina and press on the painful muscles until they release. The medicines prescribed for it are expensive and barely work.

Some women have it mild enough it barely affects their life once they make diet changes, for others nothing works and they have to insert catheters in them multiple times a day.

No one talks about interstitial cystitis. Many urologists don’t even know how to diagnose or treat it. I went to 4 urologists over 3 years and not one could diagnose it or spend more than 10 minutes on me. I was told to catheterize myself daily, to take pills constantly, I even was told that if I told my body to relax, it would fix my bladder spasms. Mind over matter. But it took a urogynocologist minutes to diagnose me by feeling the tense overly thickened muscles in my pelvic floor.

Even with a diagnosis, i.c. is still hard to live with and I struggle every day. Sex sets it into a flare. Not drinking enough sets it into a flare. Not peeing every three hours sets it into a flare. Sometimes nothing at all causes spasms and infections.

I just want people to be more aware how serious interstitial cystitis is in women’s health and to recognize the struggles we go through. I want doctors to be educated on the condition and take the scared women in pain that go to them for help. I want people to not be afraid to talk about it even though it involves “bathroom stuff.” It’s something many women suffer from and we need to treat them better.