Fet Milner

Bedwetter

I wet the bed until I was eight or nine. According to the "MacDonald Triad", bedwetting beyond the normal age is common to many serial killers. While I cannot deny fantasising about torturing and flaying a number of people (I did, after all, go to a truly reprehensible boarding school), I have not yet been bold enough to enact those desires. Nor was I a fire-starter or animal-killer in childhood (the two other aspects of the MacDonald Triad). My bedwetting, unlike most serial killers, did not stem from psychological disturbances, but from a urinary tract infection.

Urinary tract infections are relatively common in children, but most can be cleared up relatively simply by a course of antibiotics. Not so the vile bacteria that set up a veritable principality in my bladder and urethra. Anyone who remembers having a urinary tract infection will no doubt recall the burning pain associated with going to the toilet. Anyone who remembers having certain STIs will no doubt recall similar sensations. Simply calling it a "burning sensation" -- as the medicos so describe it, delighting in the opportunity to exercise their powers of understatement -- does nothing to fully express the agony. "Pissing razorblades" is more accurate, but the pain applies itself even before the urine leaves the bladder. It was this extreme pain -- unequaled in my experience by any injury or medical condition -- that led me to my bedwetting. If your bladder does not empty during the day, it finds its own way out in the darker, quieter hours.

When my parents finally tired of the acrid morning odour and the fortnightly appointments with the doctor, I was booked into hospital for a dual laparoscopy. That is, I was to have cameras inserted simultaneously down my throat and into my bladder via my urethra, ostensibly to aid the doctors in developing a cure. The camera in my throat was only mildly uncomfortable. My urethra, on the other hand, was enraged at this invasion of its privacy. Imagine the size of a nine-year old's urethra. Imagine the size of tube required to deliver even a minute camera to the bladder. Imagine then, if you will, that the doctors then request that I attempt to urinate while said camera is obstructing the only exit. The urethra, distended beyond reason, was not to recover for quite some weeks, I assure you, during which time the pain was even more unbearable, such that I would wake screaming as I wet my bed. That I have not yet succumbed to my murderous desires and started a clash of great minds with an intellectual FBI-style investigator is, possibly, a miracle.

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