Marc42, When I was 14 years old (I’m 75 now), I experienced a surgical mishap that significantly damaged my bladder control. I’ve never been reliably dry at night since then, and my experience with daytime incontinence has been somewhat variable. After the surgical problem, I was daytime incontinent and had to wear diapers to high school for the first three years. However, I was a fanatic about doing what nowadays are called Kegel exercises and got to the point where I could generally go without a daytime diaper by my fourth year in high school. Things went along like that throughout university and until I was in my early forties, when I started having daytime leakage problems once again. At that time, I consulted my family doctor, who sent me to a urologist, who sent me to a urologist that specializes in treating incontinence. The second urologist put me through an extensive range of invasive and noninvasive tests but could not determine the cause of my incontinence. He also gave me successive three-months trials on six different drugs, some of which produced unpleasant side effects but none of which had a significant effect on my incontinence. The upshot of all that is that all I can really do about my incontinence is to manage it in a way that enables me to go about my life as normally as possible. Upon the recommendation of the urologist, I tried wearing an external catheter. However, after trying several brands of external catheters, I settled on wearing a diaper. Once I got used to it, diapers have become just the kind of underpants that I need to wear; and I no longer pay much emotional attention to the fact that I’m incontinent.
