Urinary Tract Infections are among the most painful experiences I've ever had. I think they're very painful for most people but do vary from person to person. Suffice that if I was in that kind of pain without hope of it getting better I would definitely want to die. In fact, when I have UTIs I often think of my grandmother and feel sad for the suffering she had to go through. (prolonged pain when she wanted to die, not UTIs per se)

As noted yesterday, within a couple of hours of Kefflex (the antibiotic prescribed) I was doing okay.(*) They gave me a day's worth of antibiotics and told me to call the following morning (today) to confirm the test results and have them phone in the prescription for the rest.

When I called they told me that the results were negative. Having felt the way I did yesterday and having had appropriate treatments work, this did not jive with my perception of reality, and I tried to reason with the nurse about this, but she insisted that particularly since I'm pregnant, they didn't want to be prescribing antibiotics to me unnecessarily, as use of many different antibiotics can cause yeast infections, which are harder to treat with pregnant women.

So I was left thinking: "Great, so now I'm going to have to take another stronger antibiotic to get rid of my new Kefflex resistant strain of bacteria, making me more likely to get a yeast infection, and in the mean time I get to look forward to the experience of excruciating pain yet again, most likely at an odd hour in the night after the antibiotics have washed out of my system, when I'm going to have to go to the ER and wait for an hour or two to get treated and pay a lot of money for the experience..." ;)

I didn't have a lot of time to think about it this morning, having just woken up from not enough sleep and already pushing the limits of making class on time. When I got home and was lamenting to Patri, I recalled that in telling me that the results were negative, the nurse said that "nothing grew." It then dawned on me that this is very likely because I'd taken my morning dose of cranberry-extract/d-mannose before realizing that I had a UTI. The way d-mannose works is that the bacteria bond to it rather than your body. So the urine sample I gave was likely full of inert bacteria bonded to indigestible sugar.

So I called back, and explained to the receptionist who transferred me back to the nurse. I don't know if my explanation was ever actually taken into account, but regardless of that v.s. just being sick of hearing from me, upon picking up the phone the nurse prescribed the rest of the antibiotic dose, and I am now much relieved ;)

_{(*)For those unfamiliar with how antibiotics work: it is very important to take the entire prescription even if the symptoms go away immediately, because there is often just a small amount of bacteria left after symptoms have gone away, and if antibiotics are discontinued in this state the remaining bacteria will often repopulate with an additional immunity to the antibiotic that they've been exposed to that didn't kill them.}