Do you know why she had a clean urine sample? Mistakes happen, but my experience as a whole in the hospital that night lends emphasis to the mistake. It is not just that the infection was missed accidentally, it was that the management of my diagnosis and my stay seemed so ill-informed and counter-intuitive to my needs.

She had been drinking a lot of cranberry juice -- the folk remedy for a UTI. That may have had something to do with her clean sample, though this is just speculation. Most of the times that she's had these infections, her samples have had detectable bacteria, so this was an unusual case even for her.

BTW, she had so many of these infections that her doctor eventually referred her to a urologist, who put her on a daily antibiotic (cephalexin, aka Keflex) as a preventative. She hasn't had another once since starting that, though there have been a couple of times that she felt like she might be getting one, and took an extra cephalexin, which was sufficient. I wish we had known about this option sooner.

Also: my pointing out that UTIs can sometimes fail to show up in the urine test was not intended as a defense of the way the hospital treated you. Quite the contrary: doctors should know that that can happen. My wife and I were not happy with the way she was treated on this occasion as well — it took hours to convince them to start the antibiotics, and she was in a lot of pain.

The cranberry juice thing is inconclusive, but I still drink a lot of it as well!

>Quite the contrary: doctors should know that that can happen.

Okay, thanks for clarifying. This is how I felt. It was silly to me that I could have all the symptoms of a UTI, only to have everything written off because of a clean urine sample. I think it was hopeful thinking on the doctor's part-- she just wanted me out of the bed so she could clear the waiting room.

How recurrent were your wife's UTIs, if you don't mind?

>> doctors should know that that can happen

In fairness, I guess it really doesn't happen very often — the ER doc in my wife's situation commented that she had never seen it before. On the other hand, pulled muscles don't cause fever. I understand a little bit of reluctance to offer antibiotics, as they have been overused, but geez, you have a patient with a fever and in terrible pain, indeed with all the other symptoms of a kidney infection, what's really the downside to going ahead and starting the antibiotic to see what happens? That's how I see it, anyway; I'm not a doctor.

I think the best thing is to do another urine test. I'm also wary about antibiotics, but it doesn't hurt to keep the patient around for another hour or two to get a fresh sample and test it. But, the doctor assured me it was just a mechanical issue ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is from memory, but it seemed like there was the better part of a year when it wouldn't be more than two or three weeks after she was over one that she'd get another one.

Really, she should have been referred to the urologist a lot sooner.

That must have been hard, it's good she's on regular antibiotics now. Mine seem to be occurring once a year, almost to the day.

I had issues with bedwetting as a child and into my late teens. I went to sleep specialists, urologists, and psychologists but nobody could say anything about it. I think it's somehow related to what I've been experiencing lately but I don't know what to do about it. I was always getting infections as a kid too (ears, eyes, bladder, kidney) but not really flu or colds (despite not being vaccinated). Has your wife experienced any of these things in her youth?