In the pantheon of Not Getting Things Done, this weekend was King-Daddy Slackoff. Part of the problem was a profound and unanticipated Need For Rest; another part was Family In Town (which is to say, not a problem at all, these are fun relatives.)

The biggest culprit was a return of my old pal, the urinary tract infection. For those of you who haven't had the pleasure of experiencing a UTI, imagine a white-hot poker being shoved up your urethra while your bladder is full of pee, and someone squeezing on your belly to keep you from releasing either. And that's the part you can discuss in mixed company.

I was raised to fear medicine, and so will put up with eight other kinds of pain, post-surgical, pre-colonoscopic, etc, but I am a baby when it comes to white-hot pokers up my urethra. When it became clear that two glasses of cranberry juice and an extra trip to the can was not going to right matters, I phoned my OB/GYN doc's answering service and, after a brief but tense exchange ("I'm sorry, we don't have 24-hour emergency contact for yeast infections"), got her to call the doc on call, who immediately called back with a prescription for my new best friend, nitrofurantoin. Sweet relief, right?

Well, sort of. The white-hot poker has been exchanged for mind-bending headache that threatens to blind me, a side effect of severe caffeine withdrawal for which there is no cure...save caffeine.

I thought I would make it. Really, I did. I AM TOUGH!!!! And I was tough until about 4pm, when it was either stab my own eyes out or give in to a cup of Barry's. Weak Barry's, for a weak communicatrix.

So it's clear that I need to add this to the list of things to grapple with in the not-too-distant future. Caffeine isn't exactly nature's RX for Crohn's disease, I know; I just hadn't realized how off the diet I'd actually gotten.

Crap on a cracker. Coffee, tea, reality television, what am I not addicted to...?

xxx c

Photo by kana* via Flickr, used under a Creative Commons license.