Something wasn’t quite right about my peeing when I left the hospital but I kept quiet because when I have the chance to escape from a hospital I take it. Things were stranger still into the evening but the problem really surfaced when I woke up with an urgent need to pee but couldn’t go. I wouldn’t say I had to pee so bad I could taste it in the back of my throat because that would be gross but I probably felt like I had to pee as badly as I can ever recall needing to pee. I started wondering how long it took to be poisoned and killed by the uric acid in your own urine because I thought I’d read somewhere about that happening. I sat on the toilet and tried all the tricks, imagining rains and floods and waterfalls and used muscles I didn’t know I had to draw like a syringe some liquid from my bladder before I burst. (No, I don’t usually sit when I pee but this, I could tell, would be a project.) Finally a few drops dripped, which did nothing to alleviate the urgent feeling of needing to pee. So I kept at it. After twenty minutes I managed to get a few more drops out. I eventually pieced it together that my bladder wasn’t full, in fact it was utterly empty. My need to pee feeling was the problem. Realizing that didn’t make the feeling go away and, if I hadn’t been almost as tired as I was eager to alleviate the feeling of needing to pee, I probably would have sat on the toilet all night dribbling drops of urine as I could manage to, but I had to sleep. So I lay down and fell asleep to the mantra that I didn’t need to pee I only felt like I needed to pee. Still I woke from peeing dreams throughout the night and after each one I got up and sat on the toilet and dribbled out what I could. My only tool to know I didn’t need to pee was to pee the drops I could because my need to pee indicator was frozen on need-to-go-urgently.
I called the hospital in the morning and a doctor told me I probably had a urinary tract infection. I protested that it didn’t hurt or burn I just constantly felt like I needed to pee. He said that a urinary tract infection can display as a need to pee. So he sent me to a nearby lab to pee for them to test. So now I had to hold it, even though I had nothing to hold even though it felt like I had a full bladder. I think I took a few small sips of water because I was thirsty and I knew they’d need something to test, but it required an act of will to swallow liquid when I needed to pee that badly and was about to get in a car. When I peed at the lab some of the urgent feeling subsided. I think I peed again when I got back to my mom’s and felt, by then, back to normal. By the time the doctor called to tell me I didn’t have a urinary tract infection I was able to tell him I was fine. I’d had some tubing removed from my abdomen and he said that might have caused swelling that pressed on my bladder or my need to pee indicator (he didn’t call it that).
So why did I make anyone generous enough to read my blog slightly uncomfortable and feeling like they want to pee to feel like they no longer have to pee? That’s why. Our bodies are incredible organisms but we have trouble appreciating the efficiency of the way they perform when everything is functioning properly. Reminders are nice. I thought this would be a fun story, and it is a fun story now, for me, but the truth is that night was terrifying. That feeling of needing to pee was so intense and so all encompassing, to have it present, permanently, would have been severely debilitating. To this day when I feel an urgent need to pee and start peeing and feel that sensation of needing to pee vanishing proportionately with the pee’s exit from my bladder I recall that night and fully appreciate my body’s ability to perform that task. I guess that’s why I felt an urgent need to share this story, to maybe give others a tinkling, I mean an inkling, of the wonder I experience every time I empty my bladder.
I’ve posted a couple of times on my health, Health Appreciation and The End of My Cyborg Days. Maybe I should have a category for all of them. Appreciating feeling healthy is a hard feeling to sustain. Maybe that’s why I write about my experiences of feeling ill, so I’ll more fully appreciate feeling healthy. This link to one of them has a link to the other in it:
Greg Metcalf 