I have that in the summer.

Ouch, Hil, that sucks!! Stupid students.

That's unfortunate, Hil. I'm sorry.

Askye, I'm glad you were able to get some help for your virus, and I hope you feel better soon.

asKye, so sorry 2015 has not been good for health so far. I've been meaning to come here for a week, because I was recently reminded, through a transgression of my own, that the kind of soap you use in your nether regions can trigger an IC episode. sensitive skin soap, dr. Bronner's soap, scent free soap, nearly all of them have soy lecithin, which I think, but I'm not sure, is the ingredient that's bad. The nurse practitioner at my gynecologist office suggested using Cetaphil, the kind you use on your face, because it's super mild and it's not a soap. And she's right, it does work. I saw upstream that you were wondering about vitamins. I had to look around but I found that Centrum makes one multivitamin that limits itself to a 100% RDA. It seems ok for me. When I said vitamin C was a problem for me, I should have added that upon the recommendation of an uncle decades ago, who was a big fan of the book Life Extension, I'd been taking mega doses of vitamin C ever since, like thousands of milligrams a day. The 100% rda in the Centrum seems to be fine. it's such a p.i.t.a, IC, and sometimes I forget, or try something and it doesn't work. Like, I decided to try the Dr Bronners mild castile soap.Um, nope! I hope your new doctor can help you with installations. At least for me I had four or five installations over about a two or three month period, and then, once I knew how it could help, I went back at different times like three more times for tune ups.I've been pretty much pain free since July of last year now. I think I had maybe 2 years of on off pain.

I'm using voice recognition on the tablet, and I don't think I need to white font that anyway, but it does remind me, is there a way to read white font on a tablet? I only know how to do it when I'm on laptop and I can highlight it with a mouse.

oh and, before this new doctor who just got out of the fellowship, I had a cystoscopy by the regular urologist, a regular surgical procedure. It helped for a while but it came back, in about a year and a half. It might have worked permanently if I had known then what I know now about the foods and vitamins and the soaps. so if your new Doctor offers a cystoscopy and it will be covered by your insurance I say go for it. I think this might be the last info dump I have on dealing with IC, but also, if you do do installations, ask them about the size of the catheter that they use. They had to order smaller ones for me. If I ever have an installation again I'm going to ask them to start using pediatric catheters.

Java cat, it is good to see you! To read whitefont on my iPad, I highlight, copy & paste the text into any convenient text edit area. Often I use the text edit area right on the thread. That means taking the chance of accidentally hitting post, though. That might just be mynproblem, though.

I don't think I need instillations (I still haven't found a urologist yet with everything else going on) because if I can keep up on the food thing I seem to be okay.

And I strayed with the food. I had diet coke. More than one, okay I had like 3 in a week. Which is bad, but damnit I wanted comfort. ALso I was at TJs and got some dried apples that I thought would be safe and I ate BUNCH yesterdayy and I think that might also be the culpruit.

I ordered the multivitamins from the IC shop, they are pricey but not too bad plus they come in the mail. As for soap, I've been using a locally made goats milk and oatmeal soap (which I actually got from Mom because there's a store near her that sells it so she sent it to me and then realized it was made in Vermont).

I've had cystoscopies for diagnostic reasons and also trying to figure out if the badly down bladder reflux surgery (they left pockets) was causing the recurrent infections (answer, maybe but there's no way to tell or fix it easily. Original doctors put the tubes so they are touching the stumps they left the only thing to do is fix the whole mess which no doctor will do unless there was conclusive proof that was the issue).

One thing I'm realizing in therapy is that besides the bipolar disorder I also have a lot of trauma related issues to catheters I had when I was little and would get UTIs and would just refuse to go the bathroom. So my parents had to take me to the doctor where they would empty my bladder for me. It was a pleasant experience at all and I don't know how I'd react to be awake and having an instillation done.

Just to add to the suckitude of today, when I got home after work, none of the parking spaces had been plowed. I tried to front into one of them, and got stuck. It took me 15 minutes of reversing and forwarding and getting out of the car to kick snow away and putting down kitty litter before I was able to get out. For at least five of those minutes, a police car stopped and watched me, but the office did not get out and offer to help. I ended up parking a block away, because that was where I could find a space that was reasonably clear, and then had to walk back, and the sidewalks are all solid ice. At least the houses here are right up against the sidewalk -- no front yards -- so I could hold on to people's porch railings for balance.

Oh, and on Friday, a student missed the quiz I gave, because he slipped on the ice and sprained his ankle. I told him he could make up the quiz in my office hours this morning, and he said OK. He didn't come to my office hours. So, in class, I hand back everyone else's quizzes and go over the answers. Then he comes up to me after class, says that he couldn't come in to my office hours because the buses weren't running this morning (and they weren't -- why was the university open when the bus company thought it was unsafe on the road is a good question to ask though), and so he wanted to know when he could take the makeup quiz. I said, "But you just sat there when I explained the answers to the quiz." And he said, "Oh, it's OK, you can give me different problems." NO I AM NOT WRITING AN ENTIRELY NEW QUIZ JUST FOR YOU BECAUSE YOU DIDN'T HAVE THE SENSE TO THINK "MAYBE I SHOULD SAY SOMETHING" WHEN I STARTED GOING OVER TO THE ANSWERS TO A QUIZ YOU HADN'T TAKEN YET.

So, yeah. Today sucks. And I told him he could just take the original quiz, because frankly, at this point, I don't care about one quiz, and if I didn't let him take it, he'd probably write an evaluation about how I'm evil, anyway.

Holy crap, askye, I had no idea this was something that'd been a medical issue for most of your life if I'm reading that the right way. My profound sympathies. Will have to read about bladder reflux, I've never heard of it before. Catheter stuff is awful. I saw an ad somewhere, a magazine probably, for self cathetering that made me gasp. It must be for guys with prostate issues. (All the magazines these days seem to have 80% pharm ads. Are they targeted by age, I wonder?)

Thanks, WSparrow! I'll have to fool around with that.