Five Second Rule

God is again punishing me for having sex with my husband. I have yet another bladder infection. As I am a virtuous patient, I trundled off to the doctor to get a culture and antibiotics. I have the sterilizing/wiping/urinating process down cold now: a result of the dozens of UTIs and the dozens of peeing misadventures I have had.

So, I wiped, peed, stopped, positioned, aimed, and peed some more. Then, still in pee position, I put the full sample cup on the floor in front of me, mindful of the day I dropped it in my lap while putting on the lid. I carefully got the lid, carefully positioned it, and gently pushed – and the cup slipped out to the side and was sitting there with my pants around my knees, my ass in the air, looking at a spreading puddle of pee.

My instinct took over. With one hand I grabbed the cup to save the trace of pee still in there and with the other I got wads of toilet paper, and managed to get the entire sample absorbed into one big soggy wad. Instinct did not then guide me to flush the sopping mess. I saw my hand go over the cup and squeeze the urine back in.

I was immediately concerned. What had I just mixed in to my sterile urine cup? I might be diagnosed with pollen, or Dutch Elm, or dust mites.

“Oh well,” I shrugged, “Five second rule.”

Obviously, when the assistant came back with my immediate results I had an infection. Your usual cloudy urine and bacteria. No horror at my asbestos-tainted urine, no harm, no foul. “And just in case these successive infections are a result of something more serious, we’re going to send the sample off to the lab.” Harm. Foul. Good time to confess? No. Evidently not.

And it is our little secret. I am confessing only if the results come back and I am written up in medical journals as a rare case of foot-in-bladder disease.