Coping with a Bladder Infection

Here I go again. The outrageous burning, the constant urge to urinate without warning, the inability to sit or stand for very long, the pain, the pressure, the hard stomach feeling and slight pain and the different shades of blood, which is very scary. I'm fighting my second bladder infection in one week's time. A bladder infection comes on so quickly without warning, never letting up in the middle and then suddenly stops in the same way it first started.

I thought it was interesting and cruel that when I called my doctor's office on an early Friday morning after I dealt with it for 12 hours, he wasn't in and they told me to go to urgent care over the weekend if needed and to come in as a walk-in early Monday morning. Yes, it was a woman who told me this. Does she recall how you can't leave the house when you have a bad bladder infection, unless you have a toilet seat stuck to your bottom? I thought they would call in a prescription, or two for me. It didn't happen so here I was trying to deal with a bladder infection on my own.

I read all the self-help books I had and did some online research to see if maybe it was something more. I was still left to treat it and cope with it on my own for the time being - which certainly felt like a very long time. At the beginning I also wondered if it was a vaginal infection and proceeded to treat it as one, but it wasn't. Out came the larger sanitary pads, the external creams to relieve itching and burning and the over-the-counter pain reliever. I remember my mother always telling me how cranberry juice helped a bladder infection and luckily I had some in my house, including individual powdered packets of it. I must have been on a cranberry juice kick once and it came in very handy now. I immediately started drinking it and also a lot of water which I had read about to do. Stay away from caffeine for the time being, which is known to irritate the bladder. I read to warm up cranberry sauce and drink, or eat that, so out came the can of cranberry sauce. I also read that Vitamin C helps, so I immediately started taking one per day. I promised myself to continue taking Vitamin C daily, as a precautionary measure to never getting another of these infections again. My mind then started thinking, "I must really have some bad bacteria inside of me." I got a brainstorm to take the Phillip's Colon Health pills I had, thinking its' good bacteria ingredients might help counteract the bad bacteria and I started to do so.

Some time in my life I remembered reading about Kegel exercises, which are pelvic muscle exercises that help a woman with bladder problems and I started doing them. They are simple to do and it only takes 5 minutes, 3 times per day. All you have to do is hold in your pelvic muscle for a count of 3, release it and then repeat the exercise over and over. You'll know you are working with the right muscle as you feel the comfort. To me it sort of feels like I'm pushing the urethra up, which is the area that I feel the constant burning most. We might even consider continuing this exercise as a precaution for when we may develop health problems in our latter years.

If you have a prescription of Phenazopyridine in the house, it works wonders. Even though it makes your urine orange and can possibly stain, it is very much well worth it; that's when the bigger sanitary pads come in handy. This prescription stops the burning and is supposed to stop the urge to frequently urinate. I'm not sure if it was the prescription that stopped the very frequent urge to urinate, or that the infection had passed. Whichever it was, after 3 long days of suffering at least I no longer spent most of my time in the bathroom and running to it. It was an absolute exhausting 3 days.

Unfortunately, after six days of peace I'm having some of the same symptoms again slightly, so I'm restarting my self-help regime until my doctor's appointment this week. I made the appointment to get a new prescription for the Phenazopyridine to always have on hand and I'm sure he'll prescribe an antibiotic, which I'll gladly keep on hand also.

What can you do to prepare for your next bladder infection? I'm an obsessive shopper so I had all the over-the-counter medications I mentioned above in the house. I strongly recommend that you keep any form of cranberry juice in your home - even as a can of frozen concentrate or a box of the powdered single-serving size to add to water, a can of cranberry sauce, a bottle of Vitamin C, a tube of external cream appropriate for the itching and burning, one bag of larger size sanitary pads, or bladder incontinence pads, a bottle of over-the-counter pain reliever and if you drink bottled water as I do, a case of that or a large bottle or two, just in case.... Remember those Kegel exercises, too. When the first symptoms appear, call your doctor's office to make an appointment to be medically diagnosed and treated and in the meantime, start these safe, self-help, over-the-counter treatments on your own.

If you have a bladder infection right now, feel better very soon.