Might as well start with the big one.
If I’m going to catalogue medical problems, I’d better start with the stuff that was present in childhood and either continued on, or affected things greatly.
The elephant in the room. The thing that’s there, and “everyone” knows it, but you just don’t talk about it.
My existence for the first decade and a half plus of my life was the family embarrassment. I put a damper on anything they wanted to do. I have parents, an older brother, and a younger sister. I cramped their style.
You see, from as long as I could remember until the fall of my senior year of high school, I experienced nightly enuresis. In common parlance, I wet the bed. Consistently, every night.
I had zero control over this phenomenon, but was told on a regular basis that I was doing it consciously and I had to simply decide not to do it anymore.
By now anyone reading this should begin to understand the kind of damage that sort of talk was doing.
I still carry a lot of baggage from my childhood, stuff I will probably never really come to peace with. One of the biggest is the fact that I was always cast as a liar. It didn’t matter what kind of proof I could present to verify anything I said. It was assumed I was lying until someone else independently proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was not.
I was very scrupulous not to lie when I was growing up. My existence was too confusing. You see, in order to effectively lie, you have to be able to have a clear image of the truth in your mind, then formulate a clear image of something “not” that truth, then consciously choose to present that “not truth” as truth.
I can’t do any of that.
I had enough trouble just trying to figure out what was real and what was not. I didn’t have any brain cells left over to consciously lie.
That didn’t stop folks from accusing though, particularly my sister. Thank God she grew up. She’s okay now that we’re adults. But when we were little, she was a momma’s girl and a total brat. Anything she said was taken as gospel, whether it was true or not. She got away with anything she did, and all she had to do to get sympathy was accuse me of something. It didn’t matter what, though the bigger the accusation and the more trouble I got in, the more she could get away with.
But that’s another post.
I was six when I first learned to do laundry. That was because I was told that if I was going to choose to wet the bed, I was going to clean up after it. So every day, I took my sheets, my blanket, my bedclothes, and any clothes I had worn the day before, and put them all in the washer – or with help at first because I was too short. Eventually I did it all on my own. I was then responsible for getting it all in the dryer – again with help at first until I was tall enough – and getting it out of the dryer, then getting my bed made, every day. You see, I was much older before I discovered that when other people said “making the bed”, they were really talking about straightening out the sheets on a bed already made. To me, “making the bed” literally meant starting from the fitted sheet and going on up. I had to “make my bed” every single day.
I was forbidden to discuss this “family secret” with anyone outside the family. From the time I was old enough to suspect something might be medically wrong, I tried to ask a health care professional about the matter, but I was kept under strict guard. I was never left alone with a medical professional, not even a school nurse, long enough to ask the question, even as a hypothetical one.
You see, it was embarrassing. For them. Not as much for me – I myself didn’t matter – but they didn’t want word getting out that I was experiencing this, because it would embarrass the family.
So it wasn’t until I was grown and working my first job (after leaving graduate school, again another post) that I eventually had medical evaluation.
But first, someone is probably wondering, if you are a functional adult now, then how and when did it stop?
I mentioned before that I am a devout Christian. I got saved – accepted Jesus Christ as my personal Savior – when I was in fifth grade. I prayed a long time about God curing this problem, but it wasn’t until I got to be a high school senior that I got desperate.
I had the opportunity to go with a group from my high school down from Pennsylvania, where we were living at the time, to South Carolina to visit Bob Jones University for a high school fine arts competition and preaching conference. Several of my classmates were going, and I wanted to go – but could not, as long as my problem persisted. So I prayed. And prayed. And God was gracious and relented, and at first I had no idea the price I would pay for exchanging daily enuresis.
I did indeed get to go to BJU for the festival. When I graduated high school, I had been awarded a scholarship to Temple University (I graduated as valedictorian of the class of 1987). So my parents and I fought. I knew God wanted me at BJU. I knew just as well that we didn’t have the resources for me to go there. So I put up with Temple for a year. It was the worst decision I have ever made. It’s not a good idea to fight God. And it screwed me up royally academically.
After a series of events (again, perhaps a future post), I did finally end up at BJU, and graduated in 1991 with a B.S. in premedicine with a chemistry emphasis. I moved to Charleston to begin graduate school at the Medical University of South Carolina College of Medicine, as my dream had always been to become a family doctor and go find a small town to set up a shingle in.
Of course, God had other plans.
In 1994 I left school and started work as a medical transcriptionist at (then) East Cooper Community Hospital. When I finally had insurance and access to competent doctors… I could gauge many of them by the way they dictated their reports… I was finally, for the first time in my life, evaluated by a urologist. This should have happened back when I was a child, but never did.
One of the things we discovered is that I have aberrant anatomy. This should have been a warning sign, but I didn’t see it at the time.
*Warning, medically explicit/graphic comments ahead, read at your own risk*
Most females have a urethra (the tube that leads from the bladder to the outside world) that comes out somewhere in the region of the base of the clitoris, which is a structure analogous to the male penis. In the male, the urethra travels the length of the penis before it comes out at the tip. In the female, it comes out in the general region of the clitoris for most people.
Of course, mine is different…
We found that my urethra comes out in the left vaginal side wall. This is pretty important to know, so I can warn anyone trying to catheterize me in future that they aren’t going to find the opening where it “should” be.
It also means that most of the sphincter and supporting muscle structure that should surround it, doesn’t.
Which means, that no matter what they said when I was little, it really wasn’t my fault, nor was it my choice. When I fell asleep and the pelvic musculature relaxed, there was nothing preventing the bladder from emptying whenever it got full, whether I was conscious of it or not.
And this could have been discovered when I was just a little kid, had they only taken me for even a cursory examination by a physician. Even a competent general physician would have been able to tell my urethra was anatomically in the wrong place.
But with the lack of enuresis came a steep price, one I was to discover would be quite difficult to pay.