I Had Chronic UTI Symptoms for 18 Months. This Changed Everything.

For anyone who’s never had a UTI, it’s impossible to explain.

“Would you call it pain? This feeling in your bladder?”

No. I would call it this… imagine the worst you’ve ever had to pee and someone pulls a seatbelt tight across your abdomen.

And, usually, usually, when I said that in a doctor’s office, I’d see a flicker of empathy. A recognition of how bad this feeling is.

Problem was, when I followed that statement with “Now, imagine feeling that every waking second of every day.”

The empathy disappeared.

For me, that was what was most profound.

The veil went back up. The human there with me for that split second disappeared again behind the mask. I watched the practitioner in front of me constrict back into standard of care approaches. Possibility retreated.

I’d been chasing chronic UTI symptoms for 18 months. Urinary urgency, burning while peeing, cloudy pee, weird smelling pee. Each time the standard urine culture was positive, my brain did a happy dance. Woohoo! An antibiotic prescription! At least a week (or two) of relief! There’s a physiologic reason for that I know now. We’ll cover that in a different post.

Between antibiotic rounds, life looked like this… Cranberry juice fell out of the fridge whenever it was opened. Three bottles of D-mannose sat at the ready in the supplement cabinet for an emergency restock of my supply at work, in the car, at home (hashtag when overnight shipping isn’t fast enough). Bacillus coagulans was my spirit probiotic.

Urinary urgency with negative standard urine cultures

When the standard urine cultures began returning negative, that’s when things really went sideways.

The nurse at the walk-in clinic suggested methenamine. I knew too much about methenamine (the active ingredient in many over-the-counter urinary urgency relief meds) to rely on it for relief. In case you aren’t aware, methenamine breaks down into formaldehyde (a known cancer causing compound). And, besides, why should I have to rely on popping a pill every few hours just to maintain a (urinary) urgency free life?

I began seeking help through alternative routes. Ayurvedic practitioners, Traditional Chinese Medicine guru who’d saved somebody from Crohn’s or ulcerative colitis or some autoimmune condition. Had an appointment with the urologist. Next step was a bladder cystoscopy.

One morning in December, I didn’t think I was going to be able to leave the house. Knowing full well I didn’t have to pee didn’t stop my bladder from insisting otherwise. Each time I got my pants buttoned, I was sure I’d wet my pants if I didn’t try to pee again right now. So, I acquiesced to my bladder. 30 minutes, maybe 45 minutes later, I made it to the car.

That was the morning I found Ruth Kriz, a retired nurse practitioner, talking about her own experience with interstitial cystitis and micro-infections.

Micro-infections didn't fix my urinary urgency

Spoiler… if addressing micro-infections worked for me, you wouldn’t be reading this article because I would just be another patient that the micro-infection route worked for. I wouldn’t have anything to offer beyond what Ruth has added to this field. I’d probably be spending the time I’m writing this post writing about my experience with mast cell activation syndrome or dysautonomia instead. But, here we are. And, here’s what happened when I chased micro-infections.

More rounds of antibiotics. Increasingly aggressive antibiotics. Longer duration antibiotics. At one point I was on an 875 milligram dose of amoxicillin with 125 milligrams clavulanate. By the fourth or fifth day of that treatment, my liver hurt. I finished that 7 day round of antibiotics and lo-and-behold had a relapse afterwards. Back in to my micro-infection literate practitioner… who handed me a 30-day supply of the same antibiotic.

In that moment, the world stopped spinning. Space opened. There was only now. I stared ahead at my future. Bladder instillations, estrogen cream, Botox injections, and more cranberry juice. And, I decided. This is not a reality I will accept. And, I’m stuck. I don’t know how to get to where I want, life with a healthy bladder.

As this internal dialogue played out in the span of an inhale, there was something else too. In that moment, I was still enough to hear that still small voice. “You realize you’re practicing the definition of insanity, right?”

And, me: “Ahhhh, this is what you’ve been trying to tell me the whole time!!!”

That’s what it took for me to finally listen to intuition.

I didn’t fill that prescription. I walked out of that office and did something different.

The insulin resistance I was assured I didn’t have

The whole time I’d been struggling with these chronic UTI symptoms, I’d suspected insulin resistance. To me, my pee smelled like acetone, a ketone. I was sure it was ketosis. I’d been reassured by every practitioner I’d seen over that previous 18 months that it was not. Ketones weren’t showing up in my urine, my blood tests didn’t show evidence of ketosis.

Now, I knew ketosis went hand in hand with severe diabetes, a sign that there was insufficient insulin in the body to keep blood sugar in the ideal range. This is a roundabout way of saying for me, my smelly pee pointed directly to a sudden inability to use insulin correctly that for me coincided with stopping hormonal birth control.

This alone is why I’d suspected insulin resistance. That one symptom.

And, so now, given permission to trust my intuition, I made the changes I knew to make to support insulin sensitivity.

Two weeks later, I was symptom free for the first time in 18 months without an antibiotic.

From this experience alone, I started writing about the link between insulin resistance and chronic UTI/IC symptoms for sites like Hormones Matter. When women started reaching out to share that those articles were helping them, I knew I was onto something.

This piece of my story ultimately became one of the cornerstones of my original program, UTI Freedom Formula. Over the years, I've continued following the research, questioning assumptions, iterating based on client feedback (and my own lived experience), and refining this program. Today, that work lives inside IC Freedom.

If you've been told your urine cultures are "normal", if you've been chasing micro-infections, planning life around trips to the urologist for treatments to “manage” symptoms, avoiding road trips, mapping every bathroom, and wondering whether this is simply your life now...

It isn't.

IC Freedom walks you through the three physiologic patterns I see over and over again in women with chronic urinary urgency, interstitial cystitis, recurrent UTI symptoms, and overactive bladder:

• Metabolic dysfunction

• Mast cell activation and inflammation

• An upregulated bladder-brain connection

But understanding what is happening is only the beginning.

The real goal is helping you understand why your body reached this point in the first place and how to walk it back to wellness. This program gives you actionable steps to begin changing your physiology so these symptoms resolve.

I spent 18 months chasing urgency.

I built IC Freedom so you don't have to.

If you're ready to stop managing urinary urgency and start understanding it, you can learn more about IC Freedom below.

→ [Access IC Freedom]