Hi I truly apologize if I sound stupid in this post but I never experienced diagnosing a UTI would be this complicated

Monday I woke up with a full bladder and I went to pee. After I finished I felt like I didn’t fully empty my bladder and I looked at my urine and it was a little cloudy. I had an appointment that day for something else so I was going to ask the doctor to test my urine for a UTI.

This is a doctor I rarely go to but my family does. At the end I tell him if he could test me for a UTI. He asks for my symptoms and I say well I don’t really feel any burning, maybe just a slight off feeling after I pee, but maybe it’s just starting. He kind of downplays it but still has me pee in a cup. After I’m done he looks at the pee and says it looks clear and totally fine but will test anyway. He leaves me with the nurse and goes to attend another patient.

The nurse tests with the strip and shortly after she says, hmm I can’t really tell, the line is really faint. Maybe you’re just starting but I can’t say yet so let’s wait for the culture results in two days. So I wait those days.

I call on Wednesday to see if there’s anything and she says so far it’s looking negative but we have to wait for the full report tomorrow, Thursday. At this point I really don’t have any other symptoms. I get the call Thursday late afternoon saying it looks very minimal but if I’m having a lot of symptoms they’ll prescribe me antibiotics. She asked me if I did and I told her I don’t really feel any now and she said well it’s up to you then and hung up. I picked them up but was going to start in the morning as it was late.

Then this morning I decided to go to the health department I’ve recently been going nearby. They gave me an appointment right when they opened and they did a strip test and everything came back negative (I’ll post them below.) she told me I didn’t have an infection. I told her what happened with the other doctor and showed her the antibiotics and she said no don’t take them they’re too strong anyway (cipro 500). But if you want you can call them and ask if you really had an infection in the culture result. But here it shows you don’t. But she prescribed Pyridium if I needed it.

So I called the nurse again and she told me, I agree, your results were pretty much negative. Your lab came to be less than 10,000 colonies. It’s up to you what you want to do and hung up again.

So honestly I don’t even know. Because I don’t feel anything now. I don’t want to undermine a possible infection, trust me. But why has this been so confusing 🥴