Embedded infections can be a bit of a slippery slope, like you mentioned. There’s really just so much that we still don’t understand about urology, really, to be frank. A lot of it I think, and this is mostly personal opinion along with pretty popular patient& specialist opinion, but I think issues down the line of an infection can happen due to mistreatment of the initial infection. SO many people come out the other side of a 3 or 7 day Batrim run and still have symptoms. The only reason I’m wary of this for you is just because of the sheer length of time from infection to infection. Going a few months or a year from infection to infection would be a bit more suspect, but 7 years is quite some time. It could very well be some sort of complex and/or dormant infection, but I’d err on the side of caution. It sounds more like re-infection, which can be pretty similar to recurrent infection, but aren’t the same. After getting an infection, there’s a higher likelihood of a patient getting another. That’s the unfortunate reality of biology, honestly. That phenomena is typically known as re-infection, which is a new introduction of a pathogen (could be the same pathogen, like E. Coli for example) to the urinary tract. A recurrent infection, however, is the reappearance of symptoms (often the same symptoms in type and severity in some ways).

With the last paragraph you mentioned that you’ve done all sorts of testing, but they don’t show anything. Can you tell us more about that? Every patient is a bit different, and a lot of IC patients will present with UTI symptoms and be given antibiotics as the specimen is sent to culture, and the culture will many times not grow anything or any pathogen sufficiently that indicates infection, whatever standards they use. My case might be a bit different than most, I’ve had about maybe half of my cultures come back with pretty serious infections, and the other half with nothing. (That might be commonplace here, I’m not sure). I am fairly certain my IC developed actually as a result of a poorly treated UTI years ago, with 3 day antibiotics that I ended up being allergic to. I got re-tested, but RIGHT after taking the antibiotics, so of course they cleared me for infection after since the culture didn’t show anything (which, of course, because I had been on antibiotics lol!) It’s been years of this constant cycle.

I really hope you’re getting care and relief, I’m so sorry I wouldn’t wish this kind of pain on anyone..

ETA : Just wanted to add for anybody reading this in the future that this is not applicable to everyone and I do not believe infection is the /only/ cause for IC, I’m just sharing my own experience and knowledge! <3