Emergency UTI Protocol

The 3am Wake-Up Call

From your bladder.

(In pain right now? Skip the intro and jump down to the large, bolded letters.)

Most of would rather get the other kind, honestly. One moment, you're enjoying your well-deserved beauty sleep, maybe you're even having a nice dream involving someplace warm and tropical with umbrella drinks, exotic birds calling soulfully to one another in the distance, and a guy named Xavier.

And then you wake up because Scarface is in your bladder. With a flamethrower.

You do a "how do I kill this *bleep*?" google search, because it's 3 in the freakin' morning and you're in no shape to drive to the ER and spend 2 hours in the waiting room getting to know the town drunks.
You read some stuff about cranberry juice, which you don't happen to have, and magic mushrooms with funky names, which you don't have, and d-mannose, which you don't have. Oh, and uva-ursi, and biofilms, and all kinds of pricey crap you can't pronounce that you're only going to find in the health food store...which won't be open till the hippies roll out of their futons at 9am, by which time you'll be peeing blood and raving like a lunatic.

3am UTI Emergency Protocol

Alright, the first thing you're going to do is search the spice rack for cayenne pepper. If you're like me, you've got a bottle that's been gathering dust since Pluto was a planet. That's okay, the magic is still there. 

Take 1/4 tsp of cayenne pepper and drink at least 16 oz of water, and you want to put 1 tsp of baking soda in that water. Trust me.  (Can't take cayenne or don't have it? Raw garlic, read down the page for instructions)

Baking soda will prevent a (potential) stomach upset from the cayenne, and most importantly it also raises the pH in your bladder, which deprives Scarface of food and ammunition. 

You can hide the cayenne in a bread pill, stir it into your glass of baking soda water, mix it into cottage cheese, hummus, whatever. 

Just get it into your stomach. You'll feel the relief within an hour. After an hour, drink another dose of baking soda water...or drink the same amount of water with a tablespoon of lemon juice in it.

Counterintuitively, lemon juice has an alkalizing effect when your body processes it, and I like the taste better than soda water, myself.

You want to shoot for 1/4 tsp of cayenne in your system every 4 (waking) hours, while drinking lemon water in between times and baking soda water with the cayenne. 8-12 oz of treated water every waking hour. 

I personally never had any problem taking cayenne, even on an empty stomach, but it's too much for some people. If you can't take it (have a bad reaction to peppers) but you still need immediate relief, take at least 1 large clove of raw minced garlic, with some food. NOT hot food, heat destroys the goodness. 

Drink baking soda water, as above, not only for your pH and to deodorize it, but to keep it from upsetting your stomach. 

Garlic is strong medicine, and you need food in there with it, or it will come back up in fairly short order. If you thought you didn't care for it, going down, wait till it greets you coming back.

Like the cayenne, garlic and soda water will give you pronounced relief within an hour. Take that second drink of lemon/baking soda water and go back to sleep. 

In the morning, after you've taken another dose of cayenne or garlic, and water with lemon juice or baking soda, you have a decision to make. If you caught that infection in its screeching infancy, you can very likely kill this without anything else.

If, however, this is something that's been haunting you for some time, or you still have symptoms despite what you've already done, you should get some more firepower.

Stop off at the hippy store and get olive leaf extract (20% oleurpien) and activated charcoal capsules.

Take two OLE capsules every 4 hours. Whether you're taking cayenne or garlic, you can take that and the OLE at the same time. Make sure you eat something with it, like crackers or a piece of toast, or yogurt, or whatever. Keep drinking your treated water. You want to drink a minimum of 8 oz. every waking hour.

Don't eat anything within 2 hours of going to bed. Right before you turn in, take activated charcoal, the equivalent of 1tsp, and drink 16 oz of water. 

What does charcoal do for a UTI , you ask? 

It alkalizes your system like a BOSS, I answer. 

You'll sleep through the night and wake up to a full flow of clear, painless, odorless urine. Because charcoal also adsorbs everything that isn't nailed down, you only want to take it on an empty stomach, right before bed.

Take the cayenne/garlic/olive leaf as directed, drink the water as directed, and take charcoal as directed, for at least 3 days. At that point, for a hardcore infection, you can taper down from every four hours to 3x a day for 2 days, then twice a day for 3 more. Slow down your water intake to normal levels, 6-8 glasses of water a day, and keep taking the charcoal every night until the last day, for a total of 8 days of treatment for a full-blown infection.

If you have a lighter case, cayenne pepper and lots of lemon water for 3 days will probably clear you right up.