Tuesday, September 18, 2007

Score!!!... and a prayer request...

Sweet!!! One of the largest libraries in town is literally about 3 minutes from the house! And they have all the Christian fiction together in one section!! Not that I like to have all those authors pigeonholed into one genre, but it does help when looking for something clean and fluffy to read. =) I keep finding, over and over, that God gave us a huge blessing when he gave us this little house...

And on to a prayer request... I'm beginning to be concerned that I have a chronic health problem. About 4 months ago, about May 16, I think, I started having bladder pain and urgency. (There isn't any delicate way to put it, but I've avoided asking for prayer long enough on this because it's an indelicate problem to have.) Anyway, I thought I had a low grade UTI, but when I went to the doctor, they couldn't find any infection. They gave me an antibiotic anyway and sent me home. I took the antibiotic, but I couldn't tell that it made a noticeable difference. The pain and urgency went away after about a week. Weeks passed with no problems, then the pain and urgency came back. Another visit to the dr., another lack of infection. To make a long story short, this pain has been coming up, bothering me for several days, and then dying away, every two or three weeks since May. I went to a urologist here, and he did a CAT scan, looking for a kidney stone. He found nothing. I will probably be making another appointment soon to have him do another, supposedly painful, procedure, hopefully to find something they can treat.

I looked up my symptoms on WebMD recently, and it wasn't pretty. It looks like this could be something called interstitial cystitis. It's an inflammation of the bladder wall, and it causes this kind of chronic pain and urgency. There is no cure for it, and it is most common among young and middle-aged women. When I read this, I was pretty tempted to panic. I have been tempted to panic on and off since I read it. The thought of having this chronic condition for the rest of my life is enough to make me depressed, quite frankly. I've always been pretty healthy, and I feel like I'm too young to have to begin dealing with chronic pain.

At it's worst, the pain is very distracting and keeps me from wanting to move around much at all. It can make it difficult for me to sleep at night very occasionally. At it's slightest, I can ignore it and push it away relatively easily. I have discovered that Advil can help, but I don't want to become dependent on Advil to be able to enjoy my day.

God gave me a big education in compassion through infertility. I don't want to continue that education with a chronic pain condition. I now know how my dad feels when his prostate flares up on him. I feel more compassion for him, and I know now how hard it is for him to enjoy life when it's at it's worst. I am thankful for increased compassion for him, but I don't want it at this price. I'm not going to try and sound all spiritual. I'm not Mother Theresa, and I wish God would take this away from me. Now. Please pray that the Lord would heal me of this. Oh, and also, please pray that I would find a babysitter so that I can go to the doctor when I need to go.

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