Salmonella in my WHAT?????

by Danielle
(Ottawa, Ontario, Canada)

Monday morning started off as any other normal day. I woke up at 6 am to get ready for another day with my children and daycare children. I had eaten a chicken sandwich for lunch, everything seemed fine, but my the end of the day, I was feeling queasy and I was cramping quite severely. During the night, I started to vomit HORRIBLY, throwing up on average every ten minutes or so, and NOTHING took the nausea away. I spent the next day recovering from my ordeal, assuming that I had yet again caught the common "stomach flu". The following week continued without incident, but the second week came, and I started having some mild fever, pain and urgency and bleeding with urination...and THEN came the PAIN. The pain was like nothing I have ever felt before. My husband drove me to our local Emergency Department, where they quickly and efficiently diagnosed a bladder infection and prescribed me some antibiotics. They took some urine to do a culture, but likely due to a lab error no bacteria had grown from the specimen.

I was feeling remarkably better within a week or so, which was oddly a very long time for the antibiotics to work. The usual treatment for a urinary tract infection is a three day treatment, but due to the severity of the infection, they opted to give me a 7 day treatment instead. By the end of the week I felt 100% better and carried on with my usual life. But....within 2 weeks, I was sick yet again with the same symptoms and had to return to the ER. This time, the UTI returned with a vengeance, and the pain was ten times worse than it had been before, and I was sure I was going to lose my mind. This time, the doctors gave me a different kind of antibiotic and took another urine specimen for culture. Four days later, my symptoms had become even worse, so yet again, I had to return to the ER. While there, the doctor informed me that the antibiotics they had given me 4 days earlier were NOT compatible with the bacteria that the culture had grown. So my response was to ask if the culture had actually grown something this time...and the doctor`s response was: "oh..it grew SOMETHING alright!. ..we found SALMONELLA in your bladder." WHAT???????? SALMONELLA in my WHAT?? How in the world did it get in THERE? I was so incredibly perplexed...so confused. How in the world does one get THAT in their BLADDER?
Then, I remembered. I remembered how sick I had gotten that faithful day when I threw up all night long. I had NOT in fact had the stomach flu, but in fact had a Salmonella food poisoning, and the bacteria had made it's way into my bladder, and now was heading into my right kidney..making me sick and in A LOT of pain. This infection took a very long time to heal..and in the process taught me an important lesson...