Welcome to Urinetown.

This is a post about pee. Consider yourself warned.

Chris and the other drama director at the high school where he teaches have decided to do a production of Urinetown this Spring, a brilliant, satirical musical about corporate greed and small town politics in which the residents of the town must pay in order to pee. Water shortages and all that. What's funny to me is that at many schools, the show has been met with criticism and some students/parents refuse to audition or participate in any way based on the title alone, without even knowing that there is really nothing offensive about the show at all.

Unless, of course, you consider urination offensive. In which case, we are all offensive, disgusting people. Me more than others, because I can pee up to 50 times a day.

I'm here to welcome you to Urinetown, because I live there. Six years ago, I was diagnosed with a severe form of a chronic, incurable autoimmune disease of the bladder known as Interstitial Cystitis. I've probably had it much longer than that, but it's a very hard disease to pin down and diagnose. Only my closest friends know that this is something I deal with on a daily basis. Until today, of course, when I made the decision to stick this on the Internet for the entire world to see. It is, after all (much like the musical that many people find offensive in a knee-jerk reaction sort of way based on the title alone), about pee. My pee. When I had my first diagnostic surgery six years ago, the doctor went into my bladder, filled it with saline as far as it could stretch, and then emptied it again. What came out was a lot of blood.

Diagnosis made.

There is not a day that I am not aware of the pain and fire inside my body. Anybody who suffers with chronic pain will tell you that you really do come to terms with it, in a strange sort of way. After more than seven years of daily severe pain and a daily handful of medications, the pain sort of becomes part of who you are. It molds itself to fit your basic shape and outline, and in a twisted way it intertwines with every other aspect of your personality to form part of your basic identity. I don't know life any other way, so I deal with it. I had a great model for this growing up: my mother also suffers from an autoimmune disease, though a different one from mine. My brothers and I knew our entire childhood that she was in pain; in many of my memories of her, she is sitting on her bed, grading papers, with a heating pad clutched against her chest. She, too, swallowed a handful of pills every morning like it was nothing, like it was natural as breathing. But the pain never stopped her. On family vacations and nice Saturday afternoons, she would readily hike with us in Tryon Creek State Park, or take us sledding down the enormous hill in Leadville, Colorado, or go hunting through the forest for the most perfect Christmas tree in the world. She knew (and we knew, too, as we got older) that when we got home and our fun little romps were over, she would pay for it with pain, much the same way the residents of Urinetown had to pay to pee. But she wasn't about to let her daily pain stop her from living her life.

She has been an incredible model for me.

My kids know I hurt a lot. They learn the words "bladder" and "autoimmune" much earlier than their peers do. And in many of their memories, I'm sure they'll see me in bed with a heating pad, too. But I hope that they also see me living my life in spite of my pain, see me fighting the natural urge to let it define me. I don't want my pain to dictate who I am.

I have been seeing a new pain doctor, and is trying a new treatment that sounds rather extreme, but if it works, it could change my life. Yesterday, he went into my spinal cord in two separate places, isolated the nerves that run from my bladder to my brain, and shot them full of numbing agents. Because they can't stop my bladder from eating itself from the inside out, the hope is they can stop it from sending pain messages to my brain. If I get a day or two of relief from this procedure, then in two weeks time he'll do it again. If that one, too, gives me a day or two of relief, then he'll go in with the big guns, knowing he's isolated the right nerves: he'll use some sort of radio wave something-or-other and actually deaden those nerves. He claims to have many patients who need this done every five months and are completely pain free in between. It all has to do with the miracle of the human brain and it's plasticity, with our ability to retrain our neural pathways. Seriously, brain, we're telling it, there is nothing to see here. Move along.

So there it is: my post about pee. My dirty little secret, for all the world to see. It's 3:30 in the morning as I type this, and while I am in quite a bit of pain from the procedure (he accidentally hit some nerves in my leg that should settle down soon, and the sites where the needle went into my back are quite sore--think epidural, ladies), I am happy to report that when I went into the operating room, my abdomen was aching as usual. When I came out, it wasn't.

Fingers crossed.

Because Urinetown? It's a nice place to visit, but I no longer want to live there.