Subtle post from 2009. Thought provoking.

I've been a patient of Matia's for 4 years now and have come so far in getting my health back, but continue to struggle with mild frequency and bladder irritation, especially in the mornings. When I go out of town, my bladder is usually fine. I have been trying to pinpoint what about my home is bothering me? Then I saw this post and thought to myself - maybe it's the potassium in our home water-softener. See, I have this ongoing debate with my husband about using bottled water. That is ALL I drink. He hates the wastefulness of bottled water and he's right, it is wasteful and I wish I could use the water out of the tap, but now I can attest to how important it is for me not to use the tap water.

We're on well water, so I don't have to contend with all the chemicals that are present in city water. We've even had our well tested and it's been declared "clean". But our water is also very hard so we have a softening system which uses potassium chloride. Like I said, I only drink bottled water. However when my husband makes the coffee and my hot kamut cereal in the morning, he uses tap water. He approaches everything from a very scientific viewpoint and figures that if you're boiling the water that if there is anything in the water it will be done away with at high temperature. And when someone is kind enough to make your breakfast in the morning you don't want to get too bossy :)

Anyway, I decided to do a little experiment and started getting up earlier and making my coffee and cereal with bottled water and I started to feel better! That lasted for a couple of weeks and sometime during this process I mentioned to him that I was using bottled water for cooking, but didn't mention the potassium. He started making the coffee and cereal again, and my morning frequency and irritation returned. I let it go for a few days. Then one morning he saw me making my cereal and said, oh you use that to make your cereal too???? I am actually glad that he put the tap water in without me knowing, because now I know for certain that my tap water was bugging me. So now I'm back to bottled water for the coffee and cereal and I'm feeling much better. I just wish I had figured out the potassium link a few years ago!