I am very worried about my health lately, and for once, it’s my physical health rather than the disputed future of my so-called “sanity” that is at stake.

First, though, a few caveats.

For one, I am going to be discussing a personal health problem of a very intimate and somewhat disgusting nature. So if you are squeamish or simply don’t want to get to know me that well, spin on. I am sure I will write something a little easier on the digestion tomorrow.

In the meantime, I have hundreds of thousands of words written and stored in the archive of this blog. Feel free to peruse my greatest hits.

Heck, read the crappy stuff too. It’s fun!

Another warning : I feel I must confess that I am a former (recovering?) hypochondriac, and so whatever worries I have about my health might just be the ghosts of phobias past coming back to add their doleful dirge to the haunted chorus in my head.

When I was in my early twenties, I was ridden quite hard by the hag of hypochondria, and spent a lot of time terrified that minor symptoms meant my imminent doom by a thousand plagues and defects.

The fact that in this period, I had my first encounter with Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which can only be diagnosed by a long series of tests which rule out everything else and which therefore left me with a good two years in which there might well have been something really wrong with me, as far as I knew, did not help one bit.

Oh, and one last warning : I am also experiencing the effects of a recent reduction of my Paxil dosage form 50 mg a day to 40 mg a day, so that might factor into my emotional state somehow.

Nevertheless, I am worried about my physical health, and I want to talk about it here.

Basically, I think something is wrong with my waterworks, so to speak. I keep getting this deep ache in this very specific spot about the size of my fist on the left hand (my right) side of my body. It is a very localized ache, sometimes rising to the level of being serious pain, and it seems to get a lot worse while I am urinating. It feels, in fact, like I am squeezing the urine out past some sort of blockage in there, and the blockage is none too happy about it.

In addition, I am often left with the feeling of not being quite done when I finish urinating. which is a classic sign that something is wrong in there. And it persists even if I spend considerable time trying to “make sure” I have gotten it all out. It feels like somewhere along the line, some part of the system does not fully relax and reset as it should.

And the thing about not feeling like I am done is that, well…. sometimes I am not. This is highly embarrassing to admit, but sometimes I think I am done, and I zip up and everything, but, surprise, a little more comes out.

Problems that make one wet oneself have a way of grabbing your attention where mere everyday aches and pains might not.

And it’s even worse than that, because sometimes I find my penis to be very moist (told you this was gross) after I have slept, like I have been leaking a little the whole time, and my testicles and the rest of that area are soggy too.

I am just lucky that, because of my tendency to drink lots of water to stay hydrated and flushed out, my urine is highly dilute, and tends to have little or no odour. So a few minutes with a Kleenex or some toilet paper for cleanup is usually sufficient.

It really seems to me that I have something wrong with my bladder, and that has me quite worried. We diabetics are highly prone to kidney and bladder issues, and so the idea that I have a massive bladder stone in there, or some deep valve malfunction that will require some very invasive surgery and a very long, painful, and humiliating recovery time to fix is sadly quite plausible.

Luckily, I will be seeing my doctor a week from today. I wanted to see him today, but according to his “English as a second language” receptionist (he has two, the other is a native English speaker), my doctor is on vacation, and I did not feel like asking her why he did not have a locum in his place.

(I get very nervous and flustered when dealing with people with poor English. It’s a weakness. )

So next Tuesday, I will be going to see my GP to get my pill refill and to talk to him about all of this. I imagine he will send me for some blood and urine work and mostly likely an ultrasound of the problem area. And possibly more. A urinary catheter might enter my future (and my urethra) some time in the near future. Fun, fun, fun.

Oh well, I had one once before. It’s very weird feeling and not something I would volunteer for ever again, but it is not nearly the phallic horror that you imagine it to be before you have had one.

I certainly do not like the idea that hospital stays and surgery might well be in my future. My last hospital stay, when I had my gall bladder out, was extremely unpleasant, with a great deal of bungling and neglect and people just plain not doing their job.

Maybe I will write about that some time. It would be highly cathartic.

And I am the sort of person who has a really hard time trusting himself to the competence and goodwill of others in the first place. So my stay at the Royal Columbian in New West made a bad problem a hell of a lot worse.

Oh well, who knows. Maybe the whole thing can be solved by drinking a ton of cranberry juice.

I sure hope so.

Thanks for letting me fret in text, folks.