for what it’s worth, i had nooo freakin’ idea that so many women had yeast infections and UTIs so regularly.
i’ve never worried about or had either—in spite of being far less stringent about keeping myself clean or healthy as a lot of the other responses in this thread have described. unless i traipse around in some mud, or walk a mile during daylight hours in the summer in texas, i pretty much only shower if i’m doing something special that day—not often, not routinely.
maybe i’m lucky—i have a twin sister who is obsessively cleanly & goes through a yeast infection or UTI every few months since she hit puberty—but it might just be something relatively simple: i never, ever wear pants; only extremely loose skirts. [my twin, on the other hand, doesn’t leave the house without a pair of jeans fitted so tightly that i’m a little impressed whenever she sits down.] i tend to also wear oversized boxers instead of panties.
i don’t drink water—though i drink hideous amounts of skim milk on daily basis; been like that my whole life—& my eating habits are a nutritional atrocity...i kind of tend to eat only one thing for a few months, then switch to something else [i.e..: right now, i’m kind of subsisting off of string cheese. before that, it was nutella...before that, pineapples...it goes on like that; just completely random,-not-especially -wholesome dietary phases].
my health is a crapshoot in most ways—i have the hilariously unlikely misfortune of suffering from both narcolepsy & epilepsy—but at least i never get sick. not even with the flu [or other respiratory doggerel], in spite of being a pretty obdurate smoker.
i’d attribute it to the fact that i grew up in the country in a pretty dirty house around a bajillion different animals & never washed my hands, but my twin sis grew up in the same circumstances & she gets yeast infections & UTIs with such frequency that it’s gotta be her damn tight jeans. she takes WAY, WAY better care of herself—she works out tons, maintains a balanced diet, showers daily, keeps a consistent schedule & routine—& yet she is somehow more prone to southern troubles than me.
[insofar as i can tell from personal {+ friend-&-family-wise} experience, i don’t see any correlation between cleanliness of sex & the illnesses in question—i have sex more frequently & unconventionally than she has any inclination to. my boyfriends|girlfriends are about as negligent about their cleanliness as i am, too—which only further proves my case—]
anyway. i’m just putting it out there, that maybe it has—for some ladyfaces—more to do with the clothes you wear [& perhaps the degree to which you just leave yr body alone to its own devices] than what you ingest. ...which is not to say that some of the suggestions mentioned above are fallacious—they’re quite the opposite, insofar as i can tell—but! since nobody else mentioned it explicitly & at length, & i have the useful rhetoric of having a twin to speculate upon, i thought i’d just put it out there.
also! an anecdotal remark:
to anybody worried about IUDs, you might want to check out
implanon. it’s a hormonal contraceptive subdermal implant that is [kind of hilariously?] about four times more effective at birth control than freakin’ surgical sterilisation, which i guess gets botched about 0.2% of the time [though, unlike the latter, implanon is entirely reversible—most women can get pregnant as easily as they could have prior to any hormonal contraception within a month of having the implant removed].
more to the point: it’s inserted into the underside of yr upper arm—not in the uterus, so it’s more accessible & observable—& the procedure is absurdly simple, & quick—i bruise like a peach [i am so serious. i’ve gotten black&blue marks from people quite casually poking me to get my attention, & it looks like i got into a fight with a kitten if i don’t file my nails after trimming them with nail clippers.], & the bruise from the insertion in september healed up completely within a few days flat; the spot was only tender for about thirty-six hours. i didn’t have to take any pain meds besides the local anaesthetic for the insertion procedure; i only was aware of the bruise if i accidentally jabbed the spot with a book or something, & within a week it wasn’t even tender unless i purposely poked at it to see if i could make it hurt. there’s not even a scar—& i have scars on my legs from damn mosquito bites four summers ago. it was insanely...uneventful!
i used to suffer from excruciating menstrual cramps—even on oral contraceptives + pain meds, i was still effectively much an invalid for a few days a month; no way out of it—haven’t had a whisper of a cramp since i started this implanon thing. i used to be insanely nauseated for about twelve hours, every day, after taking the pill—no sign of THAT intransigent BC side effect with implanon, either. & last but not least, i don’t have to worry about my boyfriend fucking me too fiercely for fear that he rough up any IUD—freaking GLORIOUS! [p.s. furthermore! no needing to remember to take the pill at the same time every day, or getting a refill at the pharmacy every month; you just need to remember to get it removed or replaced every three years, & you can just have yr doctor contact you when that rolls around anyway. it’s so much freaking easier on yr system, cyclically-speaking.]
[...OKAY. done with that infomercial. i just don’t get why nobody’s ever heard of this thing before. you can check out the
wikipedia article on it [or
compare it with other contraceptive methods, too].]
