This has always been a problem for me. I have been on a low dose of an anti biotic for a long time because I was getting them all the time, even when I was not sexually active. I take Cranberry capsules and do everything I am told. I am SICK of it!:drool:

Oh, Denise, I feel your pain. I had such a time with the UTIs for a long while. I finally had to take quite a bit of cranberry extract every single day (still do) and I think the most helpful thing was using wipes during/before sex. We change positions a lot and when we looked at things that might be causing all the UTIs, we finally thought that maybe it was worse when we were changing positions--esp. going from me on bottom (liquid goes down toward the bacteria) to me on top (bacteria + liquid go back towards urethra). So we started wiping with those sanitary wipes (like baby wipes for adults) every time we changed positions. At first it was a pain, but it really helps and now it's totally habit. It reduced the frequency of the UTIs a lot--I was on the verge of going on full-time antibiotics as well, and I didn't want to do that because of risk of getting resistant bacteria.

BBK, I also have problems with BV which is what you are describing--yep, it's the pH, and guys with high sperm counts especially have relatively alkaline (high pH) semen which causes more problems for us. I used the boric acid suppositories but they didn't seem to help much. But I wanted to let you know that you don't have to take oral flagyl (metronidazole)--you can either take vaginal flagyl ointment for 7 days, or clindamyacin (Clindesse) vaginal for ONE day. So much better than weeks of not being able to drink alcohol! And do have your hubby treated with flagyl too--even though he doesn't have symptoms, he can still be passing it back to you. That does help as well. It's such a pain.

Denise-

I noticed that you said you had a problem with them even when you were not sexually active. That sounds like what I used to have. It was fixed when doc looked at UT on xray (like barium swallow). It showed that I had a pocket in the tubing where urine would collect and fester - it is a rare form of diverticulitis (sp) which is usually in the intestinal tract. Anyway, I know you said the doc had looked at your bladder but if he did not look at the UT this might be worth checking out as I have had one UTI in the 8 years since surgery (which is a simple day procedure).

Thank you so much for bringing this to my attention. I will ask the dr. about that. I am not wanting them to look inside my bladder again.

How did they do the test? You said like a barium swallow, but I don't get how they can see where they need to see after swallowing barium.

All these tests are so expensive and my insurance has a $1,000 deductible.