My name is Genie. I’m from upstate New York. Kind of started about five years ago. I started feeling this constant urgency to urinate. I didn’t have incontinence. I didn’t have issues urinating. It was just a constant urge to, but it was beyond feeling the urge. It was painful. It would be at least a few times per hour some days. A ridiculous amount. And sometimes I would be able to actually urinate and other times I wasn’t able to and in the moments when I could, it was just such a relief, but then shortly after the urgency would just come back.
As you can imagine, every doctor said, “Oh, it’s probably a chronic UTI,” and I hadn’t really had many UTIs in the past, but every single test I would take would come back negative. But they still would say, “Oh, well, maybe it’s a false negative. We’ll treat you anyway.”
Finally, that led me here to Dr. Shrikhande and the first appointment I had with her, she gave me a pelvic exam. She sat there, she looked at me, she listened to me, I finally felt heard. That was the moment that like my life completely changed. I wouldn’t say that it immediately fixed things and Dr. Shrikhande was very open about this is going to be a journey. I never felt that she was pushing treatment on me and she was really taking a holistic view on this and was like, “There’s a lot of factors here.”
I’ve done another round of injections and we plan to do more and I’m continuing to see a physical therapist weekly. That has just become a part of my routine. I just am in such a better place, or just such a different place than I was last year. Both how I’m feeling physically and how I’m feeling mentally. Just recently I’ve started feeling like I can actually live my life again and do normal things.
It’s just a shame that there are so many people out there that I guess aren’t educated in this area, so many medical professionals. And it just feels like this is something that’s not talked about. I mean, it’s not a really comfortable subject to talk about. This isn’t in your head. It is real and there are people out there that can help.