A sterile body cavity is not instantly colonized or infected by a single organism getting in. Bacteria make it to the bladder and blood all the time without infection occurring.
Last time I had a female problem, I was able to treat it with vinegar. (I didn't dilute it, which meant it hurt, and the leftover itching probably wasn't from yeast.) Soap is actually a contributing factor to an imbalanced vagina. She might have some problems at first, but her bacteria colony should adapt to how she no longer cleans. If she doesn't change her rag often enough, it will soak through. I imagine that the bloodflow would help to cleanse, just like a bleeding wound will wash out the infection.
No, it was an addition to my previous post answering this: You posted in between, sorry I wasn't clear.
Millions of women even today have no access to pads or tampons. I suspect they use a pad of cloth (or a loincloth), rinsed with a little water as necessary. People in pre-industrial times put up with a lot of sores and itches simply as part of life. King Henry VIII suffered from an infected wound in his thigh for years, possibly a decade or more. Being in constant pain, it is not surprising that he was not in the most congenial of moods most of the time in his later life.
@T.Trian For the emetic, how about mustard water? I just searched and found it. It would be plausible enough. I was thinking along the lines of salt water but when I saw this, I thought it was even better. It was in WikiHow— says it's an unverified home remedy and should be treated as such. What more could you want?
Ouch. It's for a female, but still... I wonder why they wouldn't use oils or some such. Fear of the lubricant causing some damage / health problems perhaps? Okay, that makes more sense. Maybe the guy who wrote the article just got confused and mixed the two procedures, 'cause it didn't make much sense to me either to put in a catheter and then apply pressure since from all accounts I've read, the urine starts to flow as soon as the catheter is inserted (properly). Maybe that could be a home remedy she knows, e.g. learned from her step-mom, treating the infection with vinegar (probably wouldn't carry it around, but the next time they find a settlement...). I'll have to google that remedy to find some details, e.g. how quickly it works (i.e. does it take days or is one application enough), do you wash it off later, how bad it hurts etc. to have some details for the scene. It's a little weird to research this stuff when I'm used to googling guns, small unit tactics, military acronyms etc. If they offer it to her as medicine, she'd gulp it down even if it tasted horrible: in the scene, a bunch of people find her badly injured, and they do tend to her worst bleeders, but they have a sadistic streak and bad intentions, hence the trickery with the emetic. So yeah, I could definitely use that. Thanks a bunch (everyone)!
How do you know they didn't use a lubricant? I'm surprised frankly, they had catheters that small in the first place. Though I can imagine anyone who couldn't pee would attempt to get the urine out so it makes sense to me that catheterizing a bladder was something ancient people figured out centuries or more ago.
Well, if you clear your internet browser and then need to take your computer in for problems, they are going to be assuming that you caught something from porn. It would be nice to have a world where "the talk" wasn't so haphazard. Either a girl's first monthly meant sitting down with her mother or the local midwife for a full lesson, or it was a private part of a spring festival for everyone who would become twelve in the coming year. I think in modern times, you are supposed to go to a doctor for the first infection because description distorts. "This is what a common treatable thing feels like." "What you thought was a simple yeast infection is herpes and the yeast thing shouldn't hurt so bad." I think the white vinegar cured me within 24 hours with one treatment, and it hurt slightly more than the itching but it fell off sharply. I could dump apple-cider vinegar in there and try to describe it... The white vinegar douche hurt about the same as cutting up hot peppers the evening after I had been digging in wet lentil-sized gravel for a bit. (So medium jalapenos on unnoticed scratches.)
Oh, I don't, I have no idea; that's why I was asking. I just misunderstood when you said: I thought you knew / had encountered some source where it was mentioned they didn't use any lube or used water. Sorry, I'm a little slow today. Anyway, I was just wondering if they used anything, what kind it would be; I'm looking for as many little details as possible so that I can later figure out which to use in the scene. @Lewdog mentioned lard, which sounds like a likely candidate to me, thinking about it like a layman. That actually sounds pretty good, considering the story's context. Also leaves me plenty of options how to execute it. I think I get the picture now, thanks for the descriptions. The jalapeno-example especially struck a chord: I've sliced jalapenos and messed around with naga sauce, then washed my hands only once with just regular soap, gone to the bathroom and... oh, what's this weird burning sensation? And I've taken out contacts and put them back on (so both sides of the contacts had naga on them). Wakes you up pretty well first thing in the morning if you have to get up at zero dark thirty. And thinking of a medieval douche... they'd probably use similar contraptions as they did for enemas, the pig bladder douches. Of course I have no idea if this is what they really did, but this isn't a historical novel anyway, so as long as it's plausible (i.e. they had something like that at the time, regardless of whether they used it for this purpose or not), it's good enough for me...
I used a shotglass lying down and didn't spill too much. A bottle or something with a spout would've given more direct aim. But the pig-bladder might be the weapon-of-choice for whoever's selling the cure.
Thanks, that was very informative. At least now I have plenty of ways how to go about writing that stuff into the story.
