Moranifesto by Caitlin Moran

Author:Caitlin Moran
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2016-11-28T23:00:00+00:00

Slash & Burn—My Life with Cystitis

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

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