This is going to be about pee. Read on or not, the choice is yours.

Ladies, and possibly gentlemen too, you know what a UTI is. And you know when you have one…you cannot miss it. It burns, you spend so much time in the bathroom, it makes you want to climb the walls! Am I right? Well, it doesn’t always.

Several months ago I noticed my urine smelled strange, really foul. My various medications had been changed up around the same time, so I figured one of them - or a combination - just made pee smell bad. I later discontinued the one drug I thought was the main culprit…and it still smelled bad. I let that go for another month or so, despite being embarrassed to use public restrooms. Then I finally made an appointment to see my doctor. I gave a sample, and she looked at it under the microscope and saw a lot of bacteria there. She told me about asymptomatic UTI’s, which are apparently common in older women. You don’t know you have it for a long time, and meanwhile it’s fucking with your kidneys. She didn’t think I had that, but she’d send it off to a lab for testing.

It came back positive, and she immediately called in a prescription for antibiotics to my local pharmacy. Apparently I have had a UTI for months without knowing it. I had occasional irritation, but it was always mild and resolved within hours, so I figured I just had a sensitive urethra. Well, it wasn’t, it was an actual UTI!

If you notice your pee smelling weird, go see your doctor. You don’t want to end up with kidney damage from this silent, insidious infection!