I lingered at an outdoor cafe in Istanbul, spooning a dish of honeyed custard. The reddening sun hung low, and the evening felt perfect. But something was off. And I wasn’t the only one who noticed.
A friend turned to me. “You’ve been disappearing a lot,” she said. “Is everything OK?”
Well… it wasn’t, really. I bolted from the table mid-sentence. Darting inside for the ninth time that night, I collided with a waiter in my frantic sprint to pee.
Things only got worse when I flew home to New York a few days later. One night, after a boozy dinner near Central Park, I nodded off while my subway crawled back to Brooklyn. In total horror, I awoke to a dampened plastic seat. I plopped my purse on my lap and slunk out into the shadows as soon as my stop came.
How had I suddenly lost control of my bladder?
When I was a kid, my family had nicknamed me “the camel.” I prided myself on my stoicism between bathroom breaks, my ability to endure long car rides sans complaint.
Fast-forward to adulthood. That fateful summer, with no real warning, my body did a 180. Surely, I couldn’t end up in diapers while still in my 20s!
Freaked out and hoping for answers, I booked a consultation with a urologist. He spent our appointment solemnly doodling a diagram of a bladder on a scrap of paper. I left the appointment none the wiser about my condition. But I went home armed with antidiuretic drugs. When I asked how long I would need to take them, the doctor mused, “Forever, I suppose.”
The pills were expensive and nausea-inducing. Worse yet, they didn’t work. We scheduled an ultrasound. Lying back, cold jelly squelching onto my groin, I was surprised to learn that the grainy image showed two kidney stones.
The urologist mapped out a game plan. A ureteral stent would be inserted inside me for a month, then a second procedure would zap the stones. No one knew if this would mitigate my urinary issues, but it was the next level in a long game of trial and error.
The stent—a long, pronged hose—felt like metal claws scratching at my bladder. Days before my second surgery, I began shaking uncontrollably, flushed with a blazing fever. In a daze, I took a taxi to the ER, expecting to be sent home. Instead, I was rushed to the ICU with sepsis. My big-hearted nurse clucked at me as I lay wanly, strung up to IVs. “You need to learn how to self-advocate,” she said, recognizing that something had gone awry in my medical treatment for a preventable infection to have spread to my blood.
It took months of recovery, but that nurse was right. When I finally found relief, it was on my own terms.
Like a detective pulling at the threads of a case, I researched bacteria with links to incontinence and had my urine re-cultured for pathogens. Sure enough, my incontinence had a bacterial cause, but I persevered until I found the right treatment plan. It was a long shot, but the urinary problems cleared up once I found the right antibiotic.
Losing control of my bladder was one of the most disempowering periods of my life. Thankfully, for me, it was only temporary, but five years later, it’s taught me lasting lessons about when to call my own shots when it comes to my body.
For now, I’m going to relish every sunset dinner, which is now a pleasure again—not an anxiety trigger. And the only time I get up from the table is to flag the waiter down for another dessert.
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