by K M Draughn

Created on: May 04, 2009   Last Updated: May 09, 2009

Interstitial Cystitis is a terrible painful disease. I have lived with bladder pain for most of my life. At the age of three (1966) I began to hurt when I had to urinate, my mom said that I would scream and cry, and that I stayed in the bathroom trying to go all the time. Upon running test the doctors found that my bladder had not grown, it was still the size of an infant. A major surgery when I was four the doctors did modifications to my bladder to make my bladder bigger. I was OK for a while after that, just having to have routine dilations. When I started to school, I was the only one that was allowed to go to the bathroom as many times as I wanted during class; that is in most cases, there was one teacher who would not allow me too, and after the doctor wrote a letter that I must be allowed, she relented and let me go.

When I reached puberty I began to have more problems. At the age of sixteen, the pain and the frequency worsened, and the routine visits changed to the point of me seeing the doctor about every week. The doctor that had took care of me since I was three, told my parents that he was not sure but thought that I had IC. He sent me for a second opinion to another specialist in another city, and after test and a biopsy from my bladder was performed, it was confirmed that I had IC, something that I nor my parents had ever heard of, and we were not sure what to expect.

I went back to my doctor at home, and he told us that he would start treatments immediately of Cortisone and D.M.S.O. ( horse liniment) this was to be injected into my bladder by catheter, and that I would need to have these treatments several times ( three) a week.

I was a junior in high school at the time, and I was in so much pain and stayed in the bathroom so much that the last six weeks of school I was homebound. It was hard for me to lead any kind of a normal teenage life. By the time school started back in the fall of my senior year, I was a little better, but still had to have treatments twice a week, but right after Christmas got worse and went back to three times a week. At that point they homebound me again, and I missed a lot of my senior activities because of being sick.

I had planned on going to college when I graduated, but the IC did not agree, it was like I was trapped within my own body.

The doctor tried some different meds and a year later I got better, in fact my symptoms were practically gone, I would still hurt whenever I went to the bathroom and have bad

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