The Familiar UTI Symptoms

During the first week of November, I started having that familiar urinary urgency and pain. I was attempting to catheterize myself constantly. Each time I catheterized all I got out was a few dribbles. Really, my bladder was empty, but I was having spasms. The spasms were making me feel like I had to pee so badly. Right off the bat, I knew I had yet another UTI.

As soon as those symptoms hit, I put a call out to Dr. Sterling, my urologist. He didn’t seem very impressed by my symptoms.

“It could just be bladder spasms from how often you have to catheterize yourself. We can’t just immediately jump to thinking it’s an infection every time.” He told me.

“But these are all my typical symptoms,” I tried to explain to him. In one hand I was squeezing my phone in a death grip as I spoke. My other hand was playing with the ribbon on one of my teddy bears.

A Doctor With a God Complex

“If your symptoms intensify we’ll get a urinalysis and urine culture. Otherwise we’ll just know that you have some cystitis going on.  In the meantime, I will write you a script for some prescription-strength Pyridium.  That should help make you more comfortable whether it’s cystitis or an actual infection.” Dr. Sterling told me.

Professional Patient With a UTI

I hung up disgusted. This was a UTI; I could immediately tell from the symptoms. After being sick for most of my life I knew when I had a UTI.  He may be a professional urologist, but I was a professional patient.  I was the one inside my body and I could feel all the signs and symptoms better than anyone else. He was being a jerk by not listening to me. I had been going through this for over half my life. Because of that, I knew exactly how a UTI felt in my body.  Doctors who don’t listen to their patients are not quality doctors.

Melody picked up the Pyridium for me that afternoon. She brought it over as soon as she possibly could, but it didn’t really touch me.  I took so much Pyridium over the course of my professional patient career that I think the effects just kind of wore out for me. All it did was stain my J tube yellow and make me incredibly nauseous. The nausea got so bad that I started dry heaving. This made me start refluxing my J tube feeds up and out the G tube.

Getting Rushed To The Hospital

By the following day there were chunks of pus in my catheter bags. My urine had also started smelling like cat pee. Plus, I had a full-blown fever and chills.  Melody had no choice but to send me to the ER at Berkshire Medical Center by ambulance. They said that we caught it just in the nick of time.

“You haven’t gone fully septic yet, but the bacteria has spread to your bloodstream.  We will be admitting you to start you on IV antibiotics.”

I stayed in the hospital for about five days on IV antibiotics. The whole time I thanked God that they hadn’t removed that double-lumen PICC line yet.  The day I was supposed to be discharged they tried to taper me back to J tube antibiotics. The infection came roaring back. I felt like my body had been put through some sort of torture chamber.

Why All My Antibiotics are Intravenous

“It seems like the gastroparesis is progressing even further into total digestive tract failure,” Dr. Rose explained to me on one of his “check-in visits”.  “I don’t think J tube antibiotics work on you anymore.  From now on we will have to use IV antibiotics only.”

My other doctors would continue to insist on trying J tube antibiotics for several more years. Each time I ended up developing sepsis. After a good three years of that, everyone finally got on the same page. A note was put in my chart stating that my GI tract cannot absorb antibiotics. From then on all antibiotics were given intravenously. I will need them that way for the rest of my life.

Dr. Rose switched my antibiotics back to the IV form. Within a few more days I was ready to be discharged. My orders were to take IV Zosyn three times a day. My infusion pharmacy delivered it as soon as I got home, and I would be on it for an additional seven days.

Jeff and Becca Forever

The whole time I was in the hospital Jeff visited every day, he would climb in bed with me until they kicked him out, and we would watch movies, watch TV, talk, and we would do our usual rounds with all my IV bags, tube feeding, IV antibiotics, IV electrolyte replacements, extra IV fluids, all loaded up on my wheelchair’s IV pole as we went from one of his doctor’s offices to the next where he would proudly introduce me as “his Becca”.  That would always put a smile on my face. I was his Becca for life.