We’re moving at the end of the month, I have a day job and a night job (both are incredibly fulfilling and I love the people I work for and with), and my general outlook appears to be positive. I feel like I’m finally happy in more aspects of my life than I’m unhappy in.  This is noteworthy.  I think therapy helped push me in one direction, and even though I broke up with my therapist at the beginning of December, I’m not terribly worried I’ll accidentally kill myself in a fit of depression anymore.  So, that’s good!  Especially since I can’t even afford to go to therapy anymore…

Before Christmas and the awkward meeting of the ex-wife, I was referred to a urologist for a mystery UTI that wasn’t showing up on my gynocologist’s lab results, and wasn’t clearing up with antibiotics.  Believe me, I have made all of the urology jokes.  I got in a last session of therapy and a urology appointment and STILL didn’t meet my deductible.  Oh, me. You just love to spend money on the silliest things!

My first visit to Dr. Metal Instruments of Pain (Dr. MIP for short), I figured would be another pee in a cup scenario with advice to do something my gyno hadn’t thought of.  I was only prepared to pee in a cup.  I sat down with him and we talked about what I’d been going through, and he told me that he wanted to take a look in my bladder that very day.  He explained the procedure and that this was the next step to take in this series of steps that I had wrongly assumed would continue to only be me peeing in cups and taking antibiotics while my mystery pain continued.  When he described it, I figured it couldn’t be worse than what I was currently going through.  But I haven’t dubbed him Dr. MIP for nothing.

The next think I knew, I was pantsless and laying on a table with in a room with terrible cabinetry from the 80s.  There was a drain in the center of the room.*  I was laying there trying to figure out how to get my legs in the most awkward knee stirrups I’d ever experienced.  The nurse had to explain to me how to get my legs over  these swinging plastic things that she assured me were way better than what my gyno had.  I don’t mean to quibble, but I have this feeling that gynos know more about girls lying on tables than urologists do, judging by the ratio of male to female patients I observed in the lobby.  I finally wrangled myself into position and the nurse draped my pubic area.  Dr. MIP came in and fussed around with a long segmented thing that looked like a droopy pointer.

Dr. MIP told me that it might hurt a little, and I would feel a little pressure in my bladder because they were going to also fill it with water.  Then his nurse ripped a little hole in the drape.  Yeah, you read that right.  They were operating through a ripped hole in my modesty drape.  I was too confused to just tell them to take it off.  I figured they must know what they’re doing.  They work in an office with a yellow sign.  Mmhmm, my urologist’s practice thought they’d really brand themselves as peehole doctors by having a yellow sign.

Then Dr. MIP proceed to jam around my pee hole while his nurse held the rip open.  And then the bladder cam wouldn’t go into my bladder.  He popped up from between my legs and told me I had an unusually tight urethra.   Ladies and gentlemen, I’m trying to come up with a joke about that, and it the punchline is very blue, but the set up just isn’t coming to me.

This is when he pulled out curved and pointy instruments that looked positively medieval.   And he proceeded to jam them in my tight urethra while I gasped and cried.

The good news is he stretched my urethra!  The bad news is it was just an infection that my gyno hadn’t caught.  So that was a pointless yet expensive and painful procedure! Yay, modern medicine!

I’d tell you all about my other appointment wherein I got my uterus biopsied and I’m pretty sure everyone in my office thought I was getting an abortion (because that’s the kind of jokes I was making…) and how everything was fine, but there was about an hour where I was pretty sure she was going to tell me it was cancer and that I had 6 months to live.  I still haven’t received the bill for that.  Oh, god, you devil!

*That drain in the middle of the room is for the pee water combo that starts dribbling out of you because you have a camera on a pointer being jammed up your pee hole.