I’m told you always remember your first. I was 17, and my boyfriend and I had recently started having sex. It was a summer day in Los Angeles, both of my parents were at work, and as I lay around my childhood home in an amorous haze, I found myself returning with ominous frequency to the bathroom. I stared at the underwear around my ankles while urine trickled into the toilet bowl, the muscles of my pelvic floor straining. It felt like trying to pass broken glass. After a few hours, I fainted in the bathroom. I went to my mother, weepy and panicked, and she explained that I probably had a urinary tract infection, or UTI. We went to urgent care, where I was given pain relievers and a prescription for antibiotics. My symptoms vanished within a day, a feat of modern medicine that made me grateful for the pharmaceutical industry. Over the next decade or so, however, my UTIs would return at vengeful, ever shorter intervals.
