"Why is everyone so anti-enema all of a sudden?"

I couldn't help but giggle last Wednesday morning when the medical assistant in the urologist's office asked this question out loud in response to two patients in a row whining about having to have an enema before their medical procedures.

Well, indeed. Why would anyone not want an enema?

(Hit "Keep reading" to continue.)

As you might imagine, the fact that I'm in a urologists office to hear such questions means my health is still pretty shitty. The doctor's assessment last Tuesday was that I have interstitial cystitis and so he proceeded to do something called a DMSO wash. "It'll sting for 15 minutes but then it will numb everything," promised the medical assistant.

Sting was an understatement and it lasted a hell of a lot longer than 15 minutes. After two hours I couldn't even pee and had to head into the emergency room for a catheter and a morphine shot.

"You want the shot in your butt or the front of your thigh?" asked the nurse.

Normally my butt would have won hands down, but that would have meant moving. And pressure on my bladder. So my thigh it was. Ouch.

They sent me home with a catheter and the doctor decided the next morning to leave it in until Friday. Lemme tell ya, life just doesn't get much better than have a bag of piss strapped to your leg. I will never again take for granted that blissful feeling of relief you get after you pee when you've had to go for a really long time.

As it turned out, I still had a UTI, which came as no surprise to me because I managed to get an entirely different UTI a couple of weeks ago while still on antibiotics for the first UTI the week before that. But the urologist usually has about 6 patients waiting for him at any given moment so doesn't really sit down and listen to what's going on. Just assumes a lot because, hey, he's been doing this for 30 years or whatever and doesn't really need you to tell him what's going on because he already knows. That is, until he gets a patient like me whose body doesn't quite cooperate with his assumptions.

So, now I'm on heavy duty antibiotics that make me both very sleepy and very nauseous. The medication they gave me to counter the nausea also makes me very sleepy so I'm sleeping about 15 hours a day or so and during the time that I'm not sleeping I'm barely lucid. Right now is about the time the antibiotic starts to wear off, but I just took my second dose a half an hour ago so I'll probably be in a coma in about 15 minutes. However, I've been trying to type up this post for almost a week now and thought I'd take my few minutes of lucidity to clean it up enough to post already.

Right, so all of this difficulty with...um...elimination along with the fatigue that has been more profound than my normal relapses have reminded me of not quite seven years ago when I had a pulmonary embolism (blood clot in the lung) after having knee and ankle surgery. When I was admitted the hospital, my nurse introduced herself and sternly forbade me to get up to use the bathroom.

"I've had patients say to me that they'd rather die than use a bedpan and sure enough, they get up to go and that clot hits their brain or their heart and they do die before using a bed pan."

Fair enough. I was scared good and proper and used the bed pan without complaint. And was quite happy to graduate to the bedside commode the next day. A friend who was caring for me at the time joked that it was "a big potty chair." I certainly felt a bit like a toddler when the nurse stood me up after doing my business and wiped my backside. I also felt an odd sort of tingle that I now understand was arousal buried beneath a lot of embarrassment and just plain being grossed out by the close proximity to bodily fluid and waste than I was normally accustomed to or wished for.

For the last month or so I've had this odd, empty feeling when it came to my spanko-ness. Certainly pain has been a part of that, as it was last year at this time. While I am normally an insatiable spanko slut, I've had no desire at all to be spanked or to even think about it. However, it's been different than last year in that the child-like part of me -- the "Natty" me -- has barely been around. Usually when I go through a patch of bad health, the child part of me gets very cranky and constantly wants attention. And I try to give that part of me as much attention as I can by reading fun books like Harry Potter, or watching movies like Anne of Green Gables, and eating naughty stuff like ice cream or candy (though I try to get the organic stuff to give myself the illusion that it's not quite as naughty).

Now she sorta comes and goes. I know she'll be back. She came back after the P.E. eventually. And when I do feel little, I find myself thinking a lot about that nurse I had. How wonderful it was to be cared for by someone who wasn't grossed out by the help that I needed. Then I think about A. and how wonderful he's been. How instead of getting tired of me being sick all the time, he just gets sweeter.

Okay, I also took my pain meds along with the antibiotic and nausea medicine so I really am about to crash. Hopefully I'll be able to write a more well-constructed post at the end of the week.