Public Service Announcment

Disclaimer: I am about to talk about pee a lot. (If any dudes read this, which I sort of think is unlikely, I'm also going to mention menstruation! You're welcome!)

I had a minor freak-out this morning when I got up to pee: My pee was pink. At first I thought I had started my period a few days early and with no other warning signs, but upon further investigation realized this wasn't the case. I thought about it for a moment, but I'm not at my best in the morning, so I just sort of figured Andy had done something weird like flush something reddish before he left for work. I went on about my day and managed, because I am a scatterbrain, to completely forget about it.

Mid-morning, I peed at work, and the pee was RED. I suddenly remembered that this was the second time today, and no joke, I started to sweat. I felt fine, I wasn't in any way unwell, but I was apparently peeing blood! Or something!

I started taking a mental inventory of all the things that have been going into and coming out of my body in the last few days, searching for possible culprits. I've been eating a lot of salad, and I had a shitload of cherries in the last few days, but half of those were golden cherries anyway so that wouldn't be it, and I had a bunch of black raspberries, and I ATE A SHITTON OF BEETS. BEETS THAT WERE SO RED THEY WERE ALMOST PURPLE.

I walked back to my desk quicker than is normal, and immediately googled "can beets turn urine red?". It turns out this is a fairly common thing, because before I had gotten to the letter "r" in "turn," google had auto-completed the sentence. The answer, according to the Mayo Clinic, is yes. In about 14% of people, beets can turn your urine red. I am not dying of some bizarre painless bladder infection. Yet.

So. Here is my public service announcement: Beets can turn your pee red, and you probably aren't dying of a bizarre painless bladder infection. Probably.