Your Interstitial Cystitis May Be An Infection

What have you heard about interstitial cystitis so far? These are the two phrases I have heard most often:

• "Interstitial cystitis has no cure. There is no infection in your urine or bladder. You will have to live like this for the rest of your life. Here are some psychosomatic medications to manage your emotional state."

• "Interstitial cystitis is an underlying embedded bladder infection. There can be a cure, either through a clean alkaline diet, long-term oral antibiotics, natural healing methods, or antibiotic bladder instillations."

Which phrase did you hear from your doctors or urologists? What did IC experts chime in about this? What did other IC patients tell you? What do you really think you have? It's a very confusing world to navigate, since the bladder is so poorly understood in the medical field.

I have been told many various explanations. In the end, it is up to you, to believe whoever you want. You can choose to believe doctors who tell you that there is no cure and to live like this forever, or you can be your own advocate to search for a cure. I have put up my story on this blog to show how I went from wheelchair to walking, from near-death (two suicide attempts) to now healing. My story is of a girl who went from the deepest darkest despair to new discoveries of hope and surprises.

My Microgen DX tests all prove that I have an underlying infection, and the urine results of my pathogenic growth correspond to my pain. When I get "flares" (ie I am in more pain), the number of e-coli in my Microgen is much much higher. When I am feeling substantially better, the numbers are much lower. I do a Microgen kit once every month ($200 USD each kit) to watch my progress. At first, I wondered if this technology was a scam, but I saw that the e-coli counts in the kits matched my pain and progress.

If you are a strict "IC has no infection" patient, that is perfectly fine. I am not going to tell you to change your belief otherwise. My goal is not to change anyone's mind, but to merely blog about what I experience to share to other patients who may wish to explore outside the "IC is not an infection" realm. I am healed up to 80% right now after one year, and I am grateful for those who have led me to discover that I do really have an infection. Thus, when I started to treat my disease as an infection, I was able to heal.

Below are some articles which explain about chronic UTIs, re-curring UTIs, and the bladder microbiome. This may be how your Interstitial Cystitis could possible be an infection.

• Cystitis: How Bacteria Got Into Your Bladder - this is really cool, it talks about how an acute UTI becomes a recurring UTI or a long-term chronic UTI, talks about stuff like forming slimy sticky pods called biofilms and how they burrow into your bladder and how antibiotics fail to kill them.

• Bacterial Cystitis: Scroll down to the last paragraph which talks about Low-Grade Bacterial Infections And Cystitis.

• The bladder is not sterile: History and current discoveries on the urinary microbiome: This article was so scientific that I had to email it to a lab medical lady to tell me what it talks about. This article is awesome sauce. Send it to every dumbass who tells you the bladder is sterile.

• UTI bacteria use hooks to hang on inside you when you pee: Well isn't this just dandy? No wonder it's so hard to get these suckers out. It also says "In some countries, resistance in E. coli is so widespread that UTIs are effectively untreatable." That's exactly my situation. My ecoli in Microgen tests showed they were resistant to several antibiotics and their resistant list grew as I took more antibiotics, so my ecoli were learning and always one step ahead of me. And then it goes on to say, "Now researchers in Switzerland have managed to isolate individual FimH molecules for the first time, allowing them to investigate the protein’s physical properties. They found that when FimH is pulled by tensile forces – as it would be during urination – the protein responds by gripping tightly to the sugar molecules that coat the surface of human cells. “That makes it hard to flush it out,” says Tim Maier of the University of Basel."

• New findings on bacteria in female bladders: Scientists and physicians at Loyola University Chicago and Loyola Medicine were the first to publish groundbreaking research that debunked the common belief that urine in healthy women is sterile: The new study found that the microbial sharing between the vaginal and bladder microbiota includes pathogens such as E. coli and S. anginosus as well as beneficial bacteria such as L. iners and L. crispatus. This article is gold. Send it to every numbskulls who tells you that urine is sterile. This article was written in 2018 by Dr. Wolfe. I'm looking for more stuff by Dr. Wolfe. Sometimes I see articles by other medical institutions saying urine is sterile, but those are old, like 2014 or earlier.