After unwisely finishing your third cup of coffee the morning after a great night and reminiscing about the humping you did with your partner, you need to pee. You wash your now-empty mug and you go to the washroom, ready to relieve yourself and get on with your day.
But the universe has other plans for you.
After you empty your bladder, you feel the burn. You know the one. The one that even after you have peed, it still feels like you need to go. It’s uncomfortable and annoying. You look up to the ceiling and you wonder where you went wrong, what you had done to deserve another one of these intolerable infections. You think back on your night once more and suddenly it’s not a nice, steamy memory. It’s the cause of your own personal Hell.
Because you, silly girl, forgot to urinate right after having sex.
How dare you want to cuddle with your boo after bumping uglies? How dare you not throw on some clothes right after some horizontal running and drag yourself to the washroom? How dare you try to enjoy the moment and receive some much-needed affection?
If it wasn’t confirmed by the agonizing menstrual cramps you have been suffering through for eight years now, then this curve ball the universe loves to throw women’s way certainly does: that it sometimes sucks being a woman. Sure, we have boobs and those are hella fun. But we are also often subjected to ridiculous infections, all because we didn’t pee right after riding the bologna pony. Or because you accidentally wiped yourself from back to front. Or because you held your pee too long. Or because you did anything — because it sometimes feels that way.
So your water intake doubles for the next couple of days, past that which you have consumed in the entire year. You are determined to flush out the bacteria so you don’t have to make the (inevitable) trip to the walk-in clinic, where you will be forced to wait two hours just to tell a doctor you have a UTI and they send you off in less than five minutes with some antibiotics.
Day One
You go to your computer and google how to open your throat so that you can down as many bottles of water as you can in a short period of time. You try it — probably fail epically — and then try it all over again, until you have drunk enough water to dry up a lake. Not long after this gluttonous consumption, you find yourself on the toilet — for hours, because getting up is just too uncomfortable.
Day Two
Everything pisses you off. You were kept up almost all night and you nearly peed your pants because of the amount of liquids in your system. To top it all off, the symptoms have worsened and your stomach has begun to cramp up. You think about the last time you let a UTI go without getting antibiotics, how it led to a kidney infection and about how agonizing that infection had been. You can still practically taste the bile in your mouth from the amount of pain you were in — so much pain that you threw up in a trash can at the hospital, in the emergency room.
You waste no more time and go to the store to stock up on cranberry juice, too determined (and just too darn stubborn) to get rid of this without waiting an exorbitant amount of time at the clinic.
It’s still present, only this day you got even less sleep the previous night. Anything can set you off. You are ready to kill. But you are still hopeful that chugging and chugging and drinking and drinking will make everything better. Anything to not go to the clinic with the stupid long wait list.
At anybody who even breathes in your direction:
Day Four
Time to admit defeat. You tried hard. You were resilient in your fight against your evil bladder. You stood your ground against your short urethra. But, your body beat you. So, you chug some more water and you bundle up to go to the doctors. You make sure your phone is fully charged, that you downloaded some games to play and you memorize meditation tactics so that you can keep your calm while waiting at the clinic and don’t kill anyone. You make a promise to yourself that you will get as drunk as you possibly can afterwards to reward yourself for waiting so long.
While in the clinic, you begin to make vows. You vow to never have sex again and to revirginize yourself. You vow to drink cranberry juice and all other liquids consistently. You vow to always pee after sex, because let’s face it — you will never follow through with the first vow.
Later, you are given your antibiotics and you just wait for the next infection to come and screw up your life all over again.