Take a moment and think about the parts of your body that you can’t live without. Your heart. Brain. Stomach. Perhaps your lungs. For many, the bladder isn’t something that immediately comes to mind when asked this question.

 

But when your bladder and urinary tract isn’t working as it should, thinking about your bladder becomes life-consuming. This is the situation for women living with recurrent and chronic UTIs, and yet, their path to health and wellbeing is frustrated by misdiagnosis, outdated tests, and restrictive treatment guidelines.

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In this film, a cross-section of women share their lived experiences of UTI and its chronic and recurrent forms. Sophie, Phoebe, and Georgiana, were misdiagnosed as having an incurable disease for a collective decade. Enduring one UTI after another, Sophie had to move to another country before a doctor took her medical history into consideration. Mother and daughter, Jill and Liz, have suffered UTIs all their lives but still have to insist that GPs prescribe beyond the restrictive limits on the type, length and dosage of antibiotics needed. Rime has been given so much debunked and flippant medical advice, she’s left with an unshakable mistrust of doctors. Some of these women have been prescribed morphine. Others asked to consider bladder removal. Another survived life-threatening sepsis.

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Their stories are as unique as they are extreme. But what these women all have in common is they’ve been treated as unreliable witnesses to their own illnesses, and believe primary care needs to do better.

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The UTI Documentary is a Healthy Scepticism film being made by Agnes Arnold-Forster, Rita Maria Conry, and Gemma Duncan. It will be released during the Healthy Scepticism film festival in September.