Living with Pediatric Urology Issues

Early in the 1980s, when I was three or four, I suffered from recurrent urinary tract infections. The doctors at Children’s Hospital in decided to test me for reflux. I believe the doctor’s words to my mother before this procedure were, “This is not something a mother should see.” Charming.

Suffice to say she was not present. I don’t remember any real details. I remember that I liked and trusted the nurse as she prepared me. But then the Doctor came in and everything started to go horribly wrong. Beyond that all I really remember about the procedure is terror. My mother tells me that when I returned to the waiting room afterward I was white as a sheet and very quiet.

Things haven’t been quite right for me since that day. In my memory there is a clear line between before and after. Immediately after, I started down a path of distorted sexual masochism with a consistent medical motif. What ever progress I’d made to becoming potty trained was gone. I wasn’t completely out of diapers until first grade.

Worse of all the UTIs continued for years afterward and somehow evolved into recurring constipation. The possibility that I would have to return to the hospital and endure the horror again hung over me like a specter through out my childhood.

I don’t know if the test yielded any results. I never had to go through it again. When I was nine or ten an art therapist suggested I try wiping from front to back when I went to the bathroom instead of back to front. I took her advice and low and behold the UTIs went away.

Months later my older sister found a pornographic drawing I’d made and I was taken to a psychologist Everyone was convinced that I’d been molested by someone and they eagerly pried into the darkest corners of my life to get the bastard that’d done it. An entire summer was completely ruined.

Finally after months of grief and angst I declared to the psychologist that I was a freak of nature and I’d become demented all on my own. At that time I believed it too. I knew exactly when my deviancy started and I knew I was never molested. I knew when I was ten that I’d brought it all on myself and it horrified me to admit it.

Years later I sat alone in a college dorm room late one night drinking a bottle of wine while I burned the inside of my thighs with cigarettes. I’d just broken up with some guy and I was having a bad week. My drunken thoughts of self loathing lead me back to the summer I spent in the physiatrist’s office. I’d completely lost my trust in the psychiatric profession with that experience and I’d kept good on my vow never to go back. B

ut in college hundreds of miles away from my family and my home alone and intoxicated in a dark dorm room I finally figured out. Of course I’d known all along. It had always been clear to me when my sex life started to go wrong. It was a single stupid doctor visit, a thirty minute procedure called a voiding cystourethrogram that screwed me up. I’m sure my mother even signed a consent form. It was all clear, but the powerful stigma that had been with me for nearly twenty years did not go away.

It was another three or four years before I was emotionally able to tell anyone what I’d discovered. When I told my mother she cried. It wasn’t until just recently I was able to work up the nerve to start poking around on the internet to figure out exactly what the procedure entailed. I found medical web pages designed to prepare parent and child for the VCUG.

The descriptions were all cold and clinical reassuring all around that X-rays are painless and not scary (no shit); remember to remove all metal from your child’s clothing before the procedure and everything will be fine. The euphemism “may experience discomfort” appeared at one time.

On another page it was revealed that sedatives are rarely needed. All and all it is painted as a common everyday ordinary procedure that kids go through all the time. The words were all eerily familiar though and they brought me to tears as memories of the fear that haunted me through out my childhood came back. I found a few other postings on the forum of this site that were a little more reveling.

Reagan’s mother described the diagnosing process as “torture” another parent speaks of the emotional damage from repeated procedures to her own child.
I’m sure that if I went through a VCUG as an adult or an adolescent or even a preteen I’d have no problem with it, but when you’re three reality is a very different place and certain things tend to be distorted out of proportion. I remember being terrified of needles when I was getting my first booster shots. Now I have peircings and tattoos.

This was done to me by people in authority with the permission of my mother. It hurt and it was really scary. My three year old mind couldn’t understand and I came to the conclusion that some how the whole thing was all my fault. Upon reflection I wish I was whisked directly from the doctor’s office to a child psychologist where it could have all been cleared up for me (to some extent). But it was done for the sake of my health with only the best of intentions. The consent form was signed. There was no possibility of emotional trauma because there was no malicious intent. My mother had been absent and therefore didn’t have a clue until I finally told her twenty years later. Essentially at the age of three I lost my innocence and I had no one to turn to.

Now, at the age of 26, I still struggle with my sexuality. My next step is to overcome my phobia of mental health workers and talk to a physiatrist about it.

The thought that children are still enduring this with little thought given to their emotional well being saddens me. Please tell me that the pediatric urology community has learned something about this in the last twenty years, because if they haven’t they need to get a clue.