Of course, you don’t need the entire Internet to bring you low, if you’re a woman. Sometimes, your urethra will do that for you.
When it comes to teenage girls learning about life through the novels of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth century, there is a lot to recommend the notion. Pre-Internet, it’s how I learned, and it learned me good. I know deep wisdoms, such as “If you fancy someone hot who is already married, just wait a while—his wife might catch fire” (Jane Eyre).
However: one aspect that raising yourself on classic novels massively and notably fails in is in the diagnosing of medical conditions, and their subsequent safe and swift methods of remedy. Because, of course, in the olden days, there were no cures. You couldn’t do anything about pain, or illness, except divert yourself with time-consuming and disgusting things while your immune system battled away on its own: slathering your chest with hot goose fat, then wrapping it in brown paper and string. Or burning feathers under the noses of the unconscious. Mmm. That’s going to cure my fatal heart condition. Smoldering wings. Thanks.
And, so, inexorably, to cystitis. Everyone has their weak spot, and mine is my urinary tract. I suffer from recurrent cystitis. I am versed in the malfunctionings of the bladder. I have an Achilles urethra. Please do not turn away from this page, believing I have been vulgar, or uncouth. None of us chooses our illnesses, and I certainly didn’t choose mine the first time I was struck with pain, at the age of fifteen, on a beach in mid-Wales.
As the sun beat down upon my head—mirroring the burning in my atrium—I ran through my internal grimoire of illnesses, culled from the books by my bedside. Was this “the vapors”? “The fever”? “The ague”? “Dropsy”? “Furuncle”? “Grippe”? “Quinsy”? Was I suffering “ill humor”? I certainly felt ill-humored. There weren’t many gags to be had in the igneous distress I felt twelve inches down from my soul. I sat in the sea and cried.
Three hours later, back in our caravan—after a journey home my memory has kindly scrumpled and binned—I told my mother I believed I had some manner of quinsy, but in my pants.
“It is the curse of our family,” she said, sadly. “I have it. And your younger sister. She has suffered for years. It is called cystitis. You will always be slightly unsure of how to spell it.”
“Caz has it, too?” I asked, surprised. I thought back, over the last few years. I just thought she had a generally negative attitude to life. But thinking about it, locking herself in the toilet for hours on end, shouting “Fuck off!” might have been cystitis, instead, after all.
My mother then explained, with an even greater sadness, that there was neither cure nor palliative syrup for cystitis, and that the only thing the world had to offer sufferers was a hot-water bottle, clutched between the knees.
Over the twelve years of agony that followed, I learned to loathe the family’s hot-water bottle: a pink one with a teddy bear on the front, which came to stand, in my mind, as the coat of arms of pain. I learned that the only real relief came from sitting in a bath—once for eleven hours, nonstop—topping it up with hot water, and crying.
In 1999, a rumor went around that a foul remedy called “potassium citrate” would help, and I swigged liters and liters of the poison—a viscid, bitter treacle that promoted impressive retching and shuddering. The experience was roughly akin to drinking griffin urine.
I came to share with Caz terrible stories of cystitis’s evil. On one terrible occasion, Caz had felt the first warning twinges twenty minutes into a seven-hour train journey from Euston to Edinburgh, and had no recourse available other than taking a bottle of whisky into a toilet, and drinking herself into numb stupor. I had it at the Glastonbury Festival, and sat in a washing-up bowl of lukewarm water, in a tent, attending the far-off “whump-whump” of the Manic Street Preachers playing, fittingly, “Slash ’n’ Burn.” Once, I had it at my husband’s boss’s garden party, in Henley-on-Thames, and had to sit, knickerless, skirt spread wide, on his lawn, releasing tiny teaspoons of terrible hot vinegar and crying behind my sunglasses while making chitchat with middle management. That was a low.
We came to refer to it as “the real Big C,” and fear its panging advent like a tiny, pointless childbirth.
Then, when I was twenty-seven, I actually went and saw a doctor about it—bent double and weeping in his chair.
“Your mother was wrong,” he said, briskly. Turned out she, too, had relied on the novels of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for her medical information. In the glorious, blessed, holy present, you could actually knock Pants Quinsy on the head in three hours flat with a massive dose of ibuprofen and a course of antibiotics.
In conclusion: classic literature—good for the soul beset by philosophical quandary, bad for the urinary tract beset by E. coli bacteria. I shall be presenting my findings to both the British Medical Association and the British Library.