Another kidney update. (Although, really, it’s not about the kidneys anymore.)

When you get tired of hearing about my innards, let me know. (And I’ll ignore you, and keep writing about it.)

I went to the urologist yesterday. He confirmed, based on the effectiveness of the antibiotics I’ve been taking, that my symptoms were probably being caused by an infection of some kind. So I’ll finish the antibiotics, and then my symptoms should be gone.

I was also happy that he doesn’t seem worried about my kidneys at all. That’s the part of my body I was most worried about.

Unfortunately, he does want to have a look at my bladder. (Note: another detail about serna’s internal organs will be coming up in the next sentence.) Because it doesn’t seem to be fully emptying, when I urinate, he’s wondering if there might be some scar tissue in there, from the operation I had when I was younger. (That operation is mentioned in this post.) That scar tissue might be preventing it from emptying fully, and may also be what caused my infection in the first place.

Now, what do I mean when I say that he wants to “take a look at it”? Unfortunately, I mean just that. He wants to get a camera in there, and take a look around. And how does one get a camera into someone’s bladder? I can think of two ways:

1. One could cut the person open, and put the camera in that way. This is a bad idea, because you’d cause more damage getting the camera in than you’d fix by getting the camera’s results.
2. One could get a long tube, and stick it into the bladder, via the penis. This is also a bad idea, because it involves sticking a TUBE into the person’s PENIS. The penis is not meant to be a conduit for cameras.

Unfortunately for me, these are the only two choices, so it’s option 2 for me. (I believe this procedure is called a cystoscopy.) I’ve actually had this done, before, when I was much younger. I don’t have any real memories of the experience, except that it was… ahem… not pleasant. It’s probably not a good sign that my mind has blocked out any concrete memories of the experience, eh? My urologist assured me that they use fiber optics, these days, which makes the tubes narrower, so it won’t be as bad as it was when I was a child. On the other hand, he also says that I won’t be “getting in line to have it done again” either.