The New STIs: Mycoplasma, Ureaplasma, and the Things No One Tells You

It started like a thousand other things do in women’s health: With a vague burning sensation and a doctor telling me everything looked “normal.”

Not a UTI, not yeast, not bacterial vaginosis (also known as BV). I was “healthy”—supposedly. Except I wasn’t. I was peeing 15 times a day, wincing through sex, and Googling words I didn’t know how to pronounce while clutching my heating pad. I had done everything right: peeing after sex, chugging water, drinking cranberry juice, and popping Azo. And still, it felt like an elephant had taken up residence on my bladder. At 3 a.m., unable to get any real sleep, I doom-scrolled the internet. It was as if social media had read my mind or looked inside my body when it offered up a word I’d never seen before: Ureaplasma .

Medical terms rarely stop