Pee in cup
Last month, on the last day of my cycle, I purchased the diva cup. The first time I tried it, it worked great. I did not pee during those hours. It worked great, no leak, I could actually see the blood inside the cup and it was comfortable.
I used it after just to get the practice of putting it in. When I peed I had a problem. I went to pee and the cup felt extremely full and heavy. I tried to pee and only a trickle came out. I removed the cup and the pee gushed out. The cup was full of pee that has been sitting in it. Not only that, it smelled bad since the pee had been sitting in it for a while.
Yesterday I saw a spot of blood twice when wiping so I decided let me try the cup again because I’m excited about having it.
I put it in. Feels comfortable. Go pee. Pee regularly comes out but at the very end of the steam, cup begins to feel heavy. I remove, again pee inside. I rinse and put back.
What an I doing wrong? Is it the position? I have a low cervix, is that the problem? I know it’s inserted all the way, only the stem is near my entrance.
I think from all that I’m reading here the recommendation should be first and foremost that if you find pee in your menstrual cup you should go see your doctor. PERIOD. It is not at all normal and statistically impossible to have happen by accident with the cup. And especially considering the responses I’ve found when searching this and the lack of information I’ve been able to find on the subject, you should go to the doctor prepared to patiently listen to an anatomy lecture but be prepared also with lots of pointed questions about vaginal fistula.
I have Stage 4 Endometriosis, diagnosed in my 30s. It by no means suddenly popped up in my 30s though, I had had the same symptoms go undiagnosed for all that time. So by now I’m quite used to being told I don’t have the symptoms I’m having. I wasn’t aware that Endo even existed until I dealt with years of infertility. Until I found a really good infertility doctor, the general answer to “I have this weird thing happening to me” had always been “oh you’re just exaggerating, I’m sure it’s normal, you don’t know what you’re talking about, it’s not as bad as you are making it out to be”. And unfortunately without other information it is very easy to believe that repeated mantra over the evidence of your own life because we aren’t living in anyone else’s bodies so we have nothing to compare our experiences to.
To Red Herring, from those who’ve made it here after searching for anything about this, thank you very much for providing the impossible to find information! Even with the suggestion that we’re likely not experiencing what we say we are, you are still the only one I’ve been able to find answering the question of what in the world this might be. And I really appreciate your advocacy for vaginal cups, I think they are extremely important and I wish I’d had one as a teen. I would have been able to say almost 20 years sooner that I had real issues and likely could have made people listen to me. Aside from years of excruciating endo pain that I thought was just me being a wimp, a cup could have also saved me from a number of embarrassing leaks and stained sheets from my insane flow, and quite possibly could have saved me from my dealings with infertility had I been treated for endometriosis at a younger age.
Something to consider when replying to messages you find to be suggesting someone is having something bizarre and rare happen, like this, is that rare conditions while rare, do happen to some of us. And some of us will have them and will need information to explain what is going on. If someone is here researching this, they very likely are among that small number who have this issue. We should be careful to not add to the cycle of not listening to women about their bodies. I’d already encountered all the threads saying this is not possible before finding this one rare gem that gave me a glimmer of explanation. And that push I need to take it seriously.
There are not as far as I can see hundreds of people on here complaining about this, there are a handful, which fits the statistics. We all are accustomed to having periods month after month after month, and are not new to our bodies. While cups may be new to some, others of us have used them for a while before having a problem. And while I’m sure others elsewhere may just not understand how a cup or anatomy works, it seems like those of us on this thread aren’t here asking if perhaps we shouldn’t use a cup because this might happen, we all seem to have tried it and then had this bizarre problem we didn’t think could happen. I for one used a cup for a little while with no problem at all before this started happening.
And actually it’s only because of the cup that I know I’m having this issue. This is the second time for me when using a cup has helped me know more about what the heck is going on with my body. I always suspected I had a heavy flow before I had a cup but only when I started using a cup did I really see how insanely heavy it was and finally learn how far from the average my experience has been. And that heavy flow was also why I initially dismissed what I was seeing. I did not want to believe it when I found urine in my cup and have tried to convince myself it was anything else for a while now. My cup does tend to get fairly full fairly fast, even with the larger size I use. But what I’m seeing is clearly urine though and not any sort of vaginal discharge.
For me it has come with the all the time incontinence you mentioned as well and I did not connect the two because the incontinence is all the time and not just with my period. With my endo everything is worse though the week before and during my period. But incontinence is another one of those things that most people don’t want to talk about, I know I don’t. I wanted that to just be stress or diet, or something “easy” I could keep trying to fix with kegels and diet changes, but maybe now I can find a real answers.
Thank you again Red Herring for the information that I could not find anywhere else. It may be information that I don’t want to think about or deal with because it sounds quite unpleasant but at least now I know I really need to stop trying to convince myself I’m not experiencing what I’m experiencing and get myself a doctor’s appointment, if that’s even possible during this pandemic.
