How I Healed My Interstitial Cystitis

How I put my IC into complete remission first by fasting, which made my symptoms about 50% better, then by adopting a zero-carb diet that allowed me to heal in ways I didn't know were possible.

Interstitial cystitis (IC) is characterized by chronic bladder pain, inflammation, and frequency. There is very little helpful information about what causes it and how to treat it. Medications don't help most patients.

IC is one of those baffling conditions that causes one to think: how can we be living in the age of modern medicine and there be so few answers for those suffering from this condition?

My IC Background

My story of IC began with frequent urinary tract infections in my twenties (beginning in 1996). I wish I would have kept track of the number of UTIs I’ve had, but it’s likely near 100.

I had numerous infections each year, sometimes monthly. After a few years of this, I started noticing that the bladder pain wasn’t going away after days on the antibiotics. So I’d go back to my doctor and they’d change my prescription from Macrobid (aka nitrofurantoin), the first UTI choice, to Ciproflaxin, the stronger option, in case the infection was persisting.

Yet, the pain still didn’t go away. I kept having all the symptoms of a UTI: constant bladder pain and urinary frequency. But when the doctor tested me for an infection, the test came back negative.

One of the most difficult parts about this particular type of pain was that it kept me from sleeping. This pain makes you feel like you need to urinate even when there’s nothing in the bladder. It’s hard to fall asleep with that feeling. It would sometimes take me hours to fall asleep, during which time I would get up and use the restroom three, four, or more times, hoping this would relieve my pain. It didn’t.

My doctor diagnosed me with IC and sent me to the first of many urologists I would visit. As we moved around and lived in different cities, I always researched the top urologists specializing IC. These urologists performed various tests on me to try to find the root of the problem. I had a CT scan of my kidneys and bladder to make sure there were no tumors or congenital abnormalities. Everything came back normal.

They blew up my bladder with water and placed a camera in there to check for lesions. They found chronic inflammation. This was in 2010.

The urologist attempted to treat me from various angles. At one point I took Elmiron for six months, as I was told it took several months to begin working. It was expensive but did absolutely nothing for my pain.

I was counseled to keep track of my triggers, advice I followed vigilantly. I knew exactly what my triggers were without having to keep a food diary:

• Anything with caffeine was enemy number one. Caffeine can overstimulate even the healthiest bladder so it’s no surprise that I cannot tolerate one iota of caffeine ever.

• Any kind of artificial sweetener: stevia, erythritol, monk fruit, aspartame, saccharine, you name it, it causes me terrible pain.

• Sodas, even caffeine-free ones such as Sprite

• Decaf coffee and decaf black tea. Although significantly less problematic than the caffeinated versions, the acid in these can still hurt at times.

However, triggers shouldn’t be confused with causes. A trigger’s only contribution is to exasperate an already bad situation. I often walked around with a pain level of 4 on a scale of 1-10. A trigger would send my 4 to a level 6. But if I diligently avoided all triggers, which I did 95% of the time, I still had level 4 pain. The triggers weren’t causing the condition.

Things Get a Little Better for a While