About Interstitial Cystitis and Painful Bladder Syndrome
5 Major causes of IC flares
October 3, 2006 - 3:54am — JessicaVirtually every Interstitial Cystitis patient will experience flares in their lifetime. A flare is an increase in your IC symptoms that causes you to feel the affects of IC more severely than you typically do on a day-to-day basis. Flares may last for only a few hours, several days or even for some people weeks or months at a time. The reasons behind why flares occur are almost as varied as the number of IC patients who experience flares, because IC is such a highly individualized medical condition.
While many ICers will experience inexplicable flares (in other words you cannot pinpoint what you feel caused the flare), we all deal with flares that do often have a root cause behind them. When you flare you may notice a subtle or dramatic change in your symptoms, for example if you normally void 20 times a day and now you are going 45 this would likely be considered a flare. Other things besides frequency that can increase are – well every IC symptom technically – but especially pain levels (bladder, pelvic, abdominal, lower back), bloating, urgency (the feeling that you have to go right now!), a burning sensation when you void, the feeling that your bladder has not emptied entirely after you void, night time voiding (nocturia), gastrointestinal issues, and an increase in your pelvic floor dysfunction , if present in the first place.
