How We Really Feel

This is my last solo reflection of the season and I'm glad it's following this particular conversation. After speaking with Shelli Burton and Katy Hansen about integrated care for pelvic and bladder conditions, three ideas stayed with me long after the recording ended. This reflection is where I sit with them properly. The first is what Katy called "baby birding." That image of holding something j...

Most people who end up with chronic pelvic or bladder pain have seen a lot of clinicians. Often separately. Often with no one quite connecting the dots. Dr Sula is joined by Shelli Burton and Katy Hansen, both nurse practitioners at Vanderbilt University Medical Center in Nashville. Shelli specialises in interstitial cystitis, bladder pain syndrome and pelvic health, working within Vanderbilt's mu...

This is one of my solo reflection episodes. Just me, sitting with what the conversation with Dr Catriona Anderson and Neha Visavadia stirred up. We covered a lot of ground in that episode: chronic UTI, the gap in the medical definition, what it means to be dismissed by the healthcare system, and what you can actually do about it. This reflection picks up on three threads that I couldn't let go of...

If you've ever been told there's nothing wrong with you and felt worse, not better, this episode is for you. Dr Sula is joined by Dr Catriona Anderson, a GP with a special interest in recurrent and chronic UTI and founder of the Focus Medical Clinic, and Neha Visavadia, a women’s health coach and product consultant in health tech with an MSc in Health Psychology who draws on her own lived experien...

Sometimes the hardest part of a new way of managing your body isn't the technique. It's everything that happens in your head before you even get there. This is my reflection following last week's conversation with Dr Angie Rantell, consultant nurse in urogynaecology at King's College Hospital, and Keira McGarrity, psychological wellbeing practitioner and intermittent catheter user. We talked about...

If you've ever been handed a medical device and sent home to figure it out alone, this episode is for you. Dr Sula is joined by Angie Rantell, Consultant Nurse in Urogynaecology at King's College Hospital and Senior Lecturer in Pelvic Health at Brunel University, and Kiera, a psychological wellbeing practitioner, patient advocate with Convatec and catheter user herself. Two perspectives on the sam...

Acceptance gets treated like a dirty word in chronic illness. So does resignation, but for the opposite reason  we barely talk about it at all. This is my reflection following the episode with Matt Castelluccio and Jane Werbicky from United Spinal Association, where we explored what it actually takes to keep going when the systems around you weren't built with you in mind. I sit with the distincti...

When your body changes, the system rarely changes with it. Here's what you can do about that. This episode explores one of the most under-examined tensions in living with a health condition: the space between genuine acceptance and quiet resignation. Knowing the difference might be the most practical thing you can do for your own care. Matthew Castelluccio is the interim CEO of United Spinal Assoc...

What role does trauma play in bladder and pelvic conditions? There's more awareness than ever that traumatic experiences live on in the body and with it, a lot of myths. This short solo reflection is me thinking out loud after my conversation with Dr Lindsey McKernan, PhD MPH, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Urology at Vanderbilt University Medical Center and a longtime research collaborator...

When your bladder holds your trauma: emotion, the nervous system, and bladder health You know your body is telling you something. But when every test comes back clear, it becomes very hard to trust what you're feeling or to understand why it won't get better. In this episode, I'm joined by Dr Lindsey McKernan, PhD, Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Urology at Vanderbilt University Medical Cent...

There's a moment of significance in so many health journeys that rarely gets explored. The moment when you go from believing the healthcare system will help you, to realising it won't. I call this a belief flip. In this short solo reflection on my conversation with Melissa Kramer and Dr Laura Katz on the subject of the role of thoughts and beliefs in bladder conditions, I want to sit with what tha...

What if the thing keeping your bladder symptoms going isn't just the infection, it's also what your brain is doing with the threat of it? And what if that doesn’t mean that your symptoms aren’t real? That it instead is reflective of your body being a highly interconnected system that needs some further understanding. That is what this conversation with Dr Laura Katz and Melissa Kramer explores.  D...

There are images from conversations that stay with you. Carla, 21 years old, crawling across the floor to the bathroom, still being told she would grow out of it. Sheren's black diary, found years later, full of red scrawl - I can't go on like this - pain rated nine and ten, page after page. In this short solo reflection I sit with what that conversation stirred up clinically, and as someone who w...

What does it feel like to crawl across the floor to reach the bathroom? To carry a cushion everywhere because every chair in every restaurant has become a threat? To have a decade of your life measured in pain scores scrawled in a black diary? This episode starts in the reality of what severe, unrelenting pelvic pain actually looks like. A reality that does not seem to be readily apparent or appre...

Sometimes the most useful thing you can hear is someone else's honest account of how they got through something you're convinced you couldn't. In this short solo reflection, I'm thinking through the conversation I just had with Steve Kearley and Niall McCann. Two men who experienced spinal cord injuries and navigated their way, in very different ways and at very different paces, towards lives they...

Have you ever thought: if that happened to me, I couldn't cope? Or perhaps something has happened and you find yourself caught in a battle with your body, with no clear picture of how to move forward? This episode might just shift something for you. Dr Sula is joined by Dr Niall McCann, biologist, National Geographic Explorer, mountain rescuer, and Spinal Injuries Association ambassador, who susta...

What if the pressure was off getting back to how things were and instead there was a curiosity to discover something you didn't know before? In this short solo reflection, Dr Sula Windgassen sits with what stayed with her from the conversation with psychosexual therapists Kate Moyle and Lorraine Grover in The Dark Place Between My Legs , an episode about what happens to sex and intimacy when your...

When your body becomes something to manage rather than something to inhabit, intimacy tends to quietly disappear. Not all at once, but slowly, in the gaps where no one asks and you don't quite have the language to bring it up yourself. In this episode of How We Really Feel, Dr Sula Windgassen is joined by two of the most experienced psychosexual therapists working in the UK today: Kate Moyle , psy...

Why do bladder symptoms keep going even after an infection has cleared? Why does pelvic pain change, shift and evolve, sometimes feeling like a UTI, sometimes not, but never quite going away? And if your tests are coming back normal, does that mean the pain isn't real? These are the questions Dr Sula Windgassen sits with in this solo reflection following her conversation with Professor of Urology...

Your bladder doesn't work alone. It never did. It's in constant conversation with your pelvic floor, your autonomic nervous system and your brain. When that conversation becomes dysregulated, the mind body connection in pelvic pain becomes impossible to ignore, and surprisingly hard to treat without understanding it. In this episode Dr Sula goes deeper into the science of pelvic and bladder sympto...

This is a short solo reflection from Dr Sula Windgassen on what stayed with her after the first episode of How We Really Feel in conversation with consultant urologist Sachin Malde and pelvic health physiotherapist Clare Bourne about bladder symptoms, recurrent urinary tract infections and the mind body connection in chronic illness. 💡 IN THIS REFLECTION: ✅ Why hope itself can feel threatening a...

If you've ever been told your tests are normal but you know something isn't right, this episode is for you. Dr Sula is joined by  Sachin Malde, Consultant Urologist specialising in bladder pain, chronic UTIs and incontinence, and Clare Bourne, specialist pelvic health physiotherapist, author of  Strong Foundations  and expert in complex pelvic presentations . Two of the most thoughtful clinicians...