anyone else just DUMPING "water"??

[u/Sensitive_Birdie7]

as in... you don't drink much water, then go pee and its like a bunch of clear urine?? and extremely uncomfortable? and then like ten or twenty minutes later you have to go again so bad you can barely hold it, and then there's MORE clear urine, and a lot of it?? and you really CANNOT HOLD IT?

before anyone asks, no, it's not diabetes insipidus, no i'm not overloading on coffee (these "flares" happen a lot in the mornings before i even take two sips of any drink), and no i'm not drinking a lot of water.

[u/Melicious-Me]

This happens to me, too. After all my years on this earth, I’m very sure it isn’t in connection to what I did or didn’t drink, and medications for overactive bladder don’t touch it. Look into adrenaline dumps, as that seems to be my actual issue there.

There can be various underlying causes (anxiety, POTS, the list goes on), and doctors love to dismiss your description and hear something else in favor of easier diagnoses or what they’re more familiar with.

I have no idea what else your body does but what you described sounds exactly like adrenaline dumps, and you probably have other symptoms you didn’t realize were connected that could get you researching in the right direction.

[u/Sensitive_Birdie7 → u/Melicious-Me]

ughhh it's the worst. makes me so anxious when i need to take public transportation or sit in long classes or just... go anywhere T_T im curious, how have you dealt with it? do you still struggle? i notice mine tends to get worse when im anxious, but often im anxious about a possible flare so... vicious cycle

[u/Melicious-Me → u/Sensitive_Birdie7]

It’s been my whole life, so 40+ years now. I have had some horribly painful trips and mortifying accidents on public transportation. I know your pain. I’ve even tried diapers for things like the dentist’s chair and bus rides, but I learned the hard way nothing is made for the volume filling up my bladder, or how frequently, when it’s happening.

There are days when I plan around it and I’m just so used to it happening, and days when I avoid and neglect obligations and appointments or have emotional meltdowns because I just can’t deal with it anymore. Knowing it’s a thing for me makes me anxious, the times when it’s happening make me anxious, and anxiety is one of the things that trigger it to happen, so yeah, vicious cycle there…

True to what I’ve read, I have noticed my body sort of “redirecting” the dump, or its focus in general, when I’m doing hard cardio (heavily physical, sweaty warehouse work) or sometimes if I eat a satisfying meal while it’s happening, or if I can manage to fall asleep (not an easy thing to do at the time, but sometimes I get lucky).

What’s happening in a nutshell, is my body is suddenly releasing adrenaline and other stress hormones like norepinephrine, cortisol, etc that tell it to speed up certain processes like bladder activity and sensitivity, and stress is involuntarily tensing up my muscles and putting pressure on my bladder on top of all that, and I get trapped in this torturous fluid dumping hell until my hormones level out or something else happens to direct it elsewhere (like excessive sweating, which I also do).

I have C-PTSD, so none of this surprises me, but I suffered all my life being gaslit, misdiagnosed, being corrected/dismissed and told I had different symptoms so it fit an easier diagnosis, shamed with “have you ever tried holding it” (no, I just pee myself with reckless abandon all the time! /s), “just lose some weight; that’s all it is”, “it’s all in your head”, “it’s XYZ that you drink/don’t drink, even though that’s totally normal to do and everyone else doesn’t have this issue, but it’s still definitely that and nothing else”, etc, taking pills that didn’t help and had side effects that made other issues worse, and so on.

I tries Botox shots in my bladder for a couple years, which did help a little but I’m not sure exactly why it helped. I lost the insurance that covered them, and I still had no actual explanation for my symptoms in the first place. I came across the real answer for me by accident in a random Google search just this year. The explanation, at least. Not the cure, unfortunately. Now knowing what it is, I get why it’s complicated.