Cystitis is an infection of the bladder that especially affects women. The bladder is the bag in your body that holds urine before you go to the toilet. Typical signs are a burning feeling when you pass urine, needing to go very often, going in a hurry, and sometimes blood in the urine. It is a medical word, but women talk about it quite openly with friends and doctors. Treatment is often medicine from a doctor; people are also told to drink plenty of water. It is much more common in women than in men, because the tube that carries urine out is shorter, so germs have less far to travel — that is the usual school explanation, and it is broadly right, though not every case is a simple germ story. Though actually, people sometimes say cystitis for any painful wee, even before a lab test; the tidy name is tidier than every real case.

膀胱炎。有人會口語混成「尿道炎」，那是另一條管子的發炎。