Seriously what is happening with my bladder??

[Cooks]

Just wanted to chime in here and say I get like this everytime my period is due. My mom used to be like this too when her friend was due. It is completely normal as it's a way of our bodies getting ready for our friend to come along and basically cleansing Itself. You also do need to drink more water too, you don't want to dehydrate yourself. Also stress and anxiety can delay your period too as well cause it to skip or not come at all! There might be spelling errors, I'm typing this on my phone at the moment so it is hard to read what I typed!

[GlazedOwl]

Scass I honestly couldn't tell you, I'm now waking up every night at early ish times after very vivid dreams, and don't know whether its my anxiety or my bladder waking me up. Mirtazapine knocks me out for the night out cold usually so I don't know why this is happening now :(

Cooks I am now doubting that my bladder issue is correlated to my cycle at all! :( 2 periods ago I only had this peeing problem for a day or two, then it was 2 weeks leading up to my period and now since that period has stopped my bladder issue has come back and not gone.

I am horrendously worried about bladder cancer now and I don't know what to do with myself. Knock on wood my pelvic pains have subsided but I still have bladder prickling (which surprisingly I can't find anything about on Google) and keep wanting to urinate every 1-2 hours whether I've had anything to drink or not. My last drink was maybe 5 hours ago but I've been to the loo maybe 3-4 times since it's a bit better when I'm at work and on my feet all day, then I can go urinate at a normal rate but once I'm home it's defo every hour or two and it is driving my mental state absolutely downhill, and stumbling into articles about people my age with bc doesn't help! Lord knows when I'm seeing the urologist but I'm dreading both bad news and time wasted if there is none! I just don't know what to do with myself

[GlazedOwl]

And now not only am I going frequently I'm definitely not emptying my bladder properly either I go, seemingly finish, strain and pee more, or get up and two minutes later I'm peeing more. Don't know whether it's not emptying properly versus filling up very quickly. It feels like I'm going neurotic over this

[Aussie11]

Are you going to see a urologist? I've had bladder issues on and off for years. It has been put down to irritable bladder/ interstitial cystitis. Mostly urgency/frequency, sometimes flaring up to the point where it starts to ache. No UTI, sometimes blood when they do the test stick. I've had a couple of cystoscopies through urologist over the years, the first showed nothing, the more recent showed chronic inflammation. I'm on Vesicare and Amitriptyline to try and help it which sometimes it does, but then I get flare ups which last for weeks where the meds don't seem to help. In your case, in terms of anything sinister, the clear ultrasound is obviously very reassuring. I understand your fears though as I have been through them all myself so many times!

[GlazedOwl]

Aussie I've just gone through the referral online a couple of days ago. Problem 1 - it's way away in august. Problem 2 - lord knows whether the referral will be accepted by the urologist (because I've been rejected by a specialist before) or whether it'll be cancelled along the way because I had that happen as well. But if all goes well it's months away for now. If i'm lucky my symptoms get better and I can cancel altogether as I'm not horrendous enough to use up a doctor's time if I think I don't need it, but if my losing streak keeps going it'll get worse. Mind you after my two very light periods my previous one and the current cycle seem to have come back to normal, so hopefully all of these plumbing problems are simply due to my low calorie diet give or take the chronic anxiety as well? But yes I've read about both overactive bladder and IC because of course I have, thank google. Mind you I'll take either over cancer or MS (...because recently my brain went back there because apparently that causes a myriad of bladder symptoms go figure) :( All in all yes I'm very glad that at least the gyn ultrasound was clear though I don't know whether they looked at the bladder much at all. In hindsight I should've just chucked some more money at them I suppose and they could've done haha
But yeah my urination every 2 hours is still here and I suppose it doesn't help that I'm now always hyper aware of my bladder either (edit: forgot to mention I haven't had as much of that weird tingling sensation in my bladder/crotch area knock on wood!). Not sure what to do about this in the meanwhile, it's not as bad when my brain isn't obsessing about one cancer or the other, but it's pretty bad when it is!

[GlazedOwl]

p.s. speaking of this ongoing issue I don't know whether this is a result of the hyper awareness or something worse, but it seems that whenever I go pee now I definitely don't feel like I empty my whole bladder. Even if i force out the last drops, it feels like there's 5 drops left which shouldn't send any signals from your bladder but it obviously does. Can anxiety actually cause stuff like this??

[Sophs50522]

Feel your pain glazedowl. I went through all the stress and upset you are going through. I had nightmares for weeks and cried and cried that i couldn't believe i was plagued with such an annoying problem just from Anxiety.

I started having health anxiety and within so many months afterwards i woke up with urge to urinate quite frequently that never went away. I Googled as you do and read the dreaded IC and bladder cancer.. the more i panicked about it the worse it got. 1 year 5 months, an ultrasound and a cystoscopy later ( all clear ) I'm still non the wiser.
What i will say is that it rarely bothers me any more. It's still there though but it's manageable. I tend to worry about other stuff now!
Hope it resolves for you soon!

[GlazedOwl]

Sorry for not replying in a timely fashion Sophs! My mind feels slightly at ease knowing there is someone else who knows what I'm going through, because I'm sure you'll be one to know, this problem is highly annoying. Anxiety inducing, but annoying more than anything I think now lol

I don't even bother googling now because I've seen everything a trillion times anyway now ha! I really try my hardest to work around it but honestly, as with any health anxiety induced symptom, how do you ignore a symptom that you have to relieve naturally anyway? My bladder hasn't settled down one bit since last time it seems, I think I'm mainly on a pee-ever-2-hours schedule, occasional bout of pee, get up, then you have to pee once or twice after like a minute again. Rarely get the tingly-prickly feeling in my groin area. My gut feeling is still saying that this is something to do with my dieting, but then you have those nasty 'what ifs' whispering - still don't know how to ignore them, I don't think I have the skill to learn that magic trick. Then again one thing I did read somewhere was that this can be caused by a weak and/or tight pelvic floor which I found interesting - considering that anxiety and stress can both tighten up muscles. And apparently pelvic floor stuff can cause urgency, frequency, incontinence, pain you name it. Anyway, brain still thinks it's cancer so what's new?:/

I've yet to receive a confirmation letter from the urologist so I don't know whether it's worth calling up the hospital because I don't think they can look into any available cancellations if the date I've booked for a start hasn't been accepted yet?

[GlazedOwl]

So i feel slightly stupid now - I have a renal ultrasound first thing tomorrow morning and for some reason my brain up until this point was convinced that they ordered a back passage ultrasound, I thought that's a bit odd but okay lol!

But now that I've realised it's actually my bladder and kidneys they're scanning my panic's shot up trifold. No sense as to why it shot up but just feel like venting. How does one stop the brain from expecting literally every single possible bad thing to show up on the scan all at once?

[GlazedOwl]

Had the ultrasound this morning - I arrived almost an hour early and they saw me within 5 minutes. I only had around 400ml of water beforehand and they said my bladder is full, how the heck did they expect me to fit a whole liter ? Anyway went through the whole shabang and didn't really get any remarks, but what worried me is that when I emptied my bladder they obviously rescanned the bladder itself like they said they would, but they also rescanned my left kidney in particular (...the side where I DIDN'T have any pain), and I asked why they were doing that and they said something like oh we need to rescan your bladder when empty blah blah basically not what I asked but ok LOL - problem being that now my brain is thinking what did they see on the left. But then they asked whether I want the report sent to my gp or urologist? Surely if the urologist sent me there your send it there? Has anyone else had weird questions like that? Now I don't know whether to worry because they didn't say anything or just relax because there was nothing to remark on? Help