On a longer timeline, your kidneys start to produce stones as sediment builds up, causing intense pain. Damage to kidneys aside, kidney stones can lead to blockages and tear up the ureters. Producing one stone can start a process though, and one can become multiple.
Urinary tract infections similarly cause the area to become inflamed, they can lead to fever, and untreated can be dangerous. A UTI can lead to a kidney infection if bacteria travel up the ureters from the bladder. Untreated kidney infections are quite dangerous.
But remember: people who can’t regularly safely void also can’t do the most essential thing for any of these problems, which is to drink tons of water and flush your system. Which is only possible if you can access a bathroom. This is even worse if you can’t access healthcare safely or regularly.
All of the above can lead to chronic pain, which can concentrate or refer to other parts of the body. Many of these things are excruciating, and pain management can be extra taxing on the organs that flush waste, principally your liver and kidneys. Which need to move waste to stay healthy.
If somehow you don’t get beaten for being in the wrong stall or because your haircut makes someone “uncomfortable” a process still starts when we restrict access to bathrooms and what started as humiliating is now significantly damaging your health.
People with no options who try relieving themselves elsewhere can find themselves on a sex offender registry, and trying to use the bathroom discretely at a facility that doesn’t explicitly offer bathrooms to the public can be charged with trespassing.
Young people in places that don’t offer safe bathroom access regularly try to hold all day or stop going to school at all. And “just using the nurse’s bathroom” or whatever half solutions schools offer risks outing students. Ostracized and humiliated, many just disappear from public life altogether.
I also hope people take a moment to think what this means for unhoused people who also have no regular access to clean water. Sanitation isn’t just about being clean, it’s about the most basic things we need to live. Laws of exclusion, against anyone, decimate human health.
Thank you for this thread.
You’re welcome 🖤
I hope San Diego learned its lesson but I doubt it
You are very correct…real issues like this are being overwhelmed by all of the societal destruction being caused by trump and republicans…and they don’t care.
Thank you so much for this. It is such important information - and there was a lot that I hadn’t thought about. Slightly worried about what my never having a wee at work over years working in the community means, but sure it’s fine!
Very valid points made here, thank you.
Had one- don’t recommend.