oznl

It's far from perfect but I think elements of this could be drawn upon to create a hugely-more-relevant ISO

An interesting counterpoint to my previous update (relating an experience of somehow becoming aware of a bedwetting event occurring whilst dreaming about something else) happened this week. I’d gone to bed at around 11pm wearing a slightly wet Rearz overnight pre-fold diaper with a folded 24” x 24” baby’s terry nappy as a soaker pad. Fairly well protected, I fell asleep. Some indeterminate point later I was dreaming. Again, it was a kind of lucid dream. In it, I was lying in bed in the dark next to my beloved and I wanted to pee. It seemed that in my dream-state I was unaware that I was in a nappy since I was concerned that if I just peed, our bed would get wet, she would wake and I’d (once again) be in trouble. I lay there for a while thinking “Should I or shouldn’t I?” It was a cold night and I wasn’t keen on getting up to use a toilet (not that I would have done these even if I was awake as I was quite suitably dressed for peeing myself). Suddenly, my beloved stirred and got out of bed, presumably to deal with a similar issue. I briefly considered the moral dilemma of simply peeing in our bed whilst she was gone. It’s evidence of the sleeping brain’s poor capacity to make choices that I even countenanced doing this. It would hardly have been a long term solution. Her outrage would be guaranteed to eclipse the transitory comfort of relief and could be reasonably estimated to eventuate within at most a minute or two as that’s how long she’d likely be gone. If I’d just wet the bed with her still in it I might have gotten away with it for a little bit longer (fun fact: assuming that they are not making gratuitous attempts to bring attention to soggy affairs, sharing a bed that your partner has just peed in isn’t as obvious as it seems – at least at first). I then got it into my sleeping head that I’d peed (at least a bit) anyway and I needed to explore the extent of the damage at my pyjama pants (which I wasn’t wearing in real life – just a t-shirt and a nappy) and bedding. At this point I awoke. My beloved was still snoring beside me. Her departure for the bathroom was a figment of my dream. It wasn’t clear if I’d peed any more or not as I’d been a bit wet to begin with but I suspect not. I could feel that there WAS pee in my bladder. It was 2am – a time I know from experience to be a peak bedwetting zone. I relaxed, savoured the burst of wet warmth in my nappy and promptly fell back asleep. The interesting thing though is that on THIS particular night, something in my subconscious was hung up on me NOT having permission to just pee where I laid. The theme of this dream was that it would NOT be ok to just wet the bed. In my dream I fretted on this dilemma and eventually woke up either having not peed at all or at best, leaked a little bit. This narrative was the complete antithesis of last week’s dream scenario whereby I became aware I was wetting myself whilst in a dream but was completely convinced that this was “ok” and so I slept on dreaming my way through it. These examples illustrate to me that the kind of bedwetting we experience after prolonged permanent diapering is mental and not physical. We wet ourselves in our sleep not because we are incontinent but rather that we’ve re-patterned our brains to think that it is permissible and somehow, “ok” to pee in bed. If we DON’T think it is permitted for whatever reason, we wake up. The problem of course is that our sleeping brain isn’t very good at evaluating waking reality when making these choices. Confusion ensues which is what I suspect what drives the wet beds I’d rather not have had. The internal middle-manager down in the sleep-basement to whom we have delegated the authority to authorise peeing sometimes gets it wrong, or right, depending on your point of view but this is not predictable. This is probably the reason why sleep driving is universally considered to be a bad idea.

As the owner of an EV I’d draw a distinction here. The generally accepted Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Procedure (WLTP) test is wildly optimistic but is at least based on a driven vehicle use-case. For me I find it overstates real-world range by between 20 – 25% The nappy ISO test method (ISO 11948-1 if anybody is interested) is NOT based on the use case of wearing one and peeing in it. It’s therefore probably unsurprising that its outcomes bear no relationship at all to real world performance. I realise that it’s perfectly possible to build ISO-compliant concrete life jackets as its focused on standardised methods rather than performance outcomes but holy puddles Batman, this one truly misses the mark. If we tested vehicle using off-beam methods such as ISO 11948-1 we should just push the cars out of aircraft at cruise altitude. We can measure their 0 – 60mph acceleration time by how quickly they fall (fairly close numbers between models thanks to Galileo’s principle of free fall) and their top speed by their terminal velocity. I would suggest that this product/ISO will be over-stating its REAL capacity by between 300 and 500% Basically this is what I find although I'd range them down even further. Even the best super-nappy in my experience becomes increasingly fragile for every drip over 2000ml (assuming you are not laying flat in bed which MIGHT see you get to 3000ml). I've worn them for 24 hours. It's not something I'd habitually do. It's happened once or twice when I've kind of accidentally gone long-haul in one and decided that rather than change into a nappy that I'd be dumping again in 3 hours, I'd just push on and go straight to the next day's night nappy at my evening shower. Generally speaking sometime after hour 14, that nappy becomes less and less comfortable. Sagging, with noticeably cold-and-wet bits, smelly, itchy and often slightly leaky anyway. By hour 18 I'm dreaming about hot showers and clean nappies wistfully. If you do more than just wet your nappy, you're going to have a rash. Your skepticism is in my opinion, very well founded... There are so many better ways these products could be improved but consumers understand integers.

Well it's Tuesday here already on the far side of the planet. Monday (yesterday) was when I first noticed that the days are getting longer rather than shorter. For mid-winter, it was curiously warm day (around 24C/75F) and oddly humid (winter is our "dry" season). This "retirement" thing kind of sucks. After my beloved left for her work, I spent most of Monday trying to feed ethernet cable through a too-small-to-fit-into roof cavity. Why? Because I had the cable, the time, and a left-over security camera from my old house. I did it in wearing a wet Omutsu cloth diaper and plastic pants which would have been amusing for the paramedics if I'd gotten stuck up there. Today I'll terminate the cable run into the patch panel, install the camera and configure it. I'll do that in a Kins pull-on cloth nappy which I'll change into when I can be bothered changing out of my terry overnight nappy (which is amazingly comfortable). Winter is back. It's 10C/50F here on Tuesday morning but will make it up to around 22C/72F eventually...

Rage

Like many, I wore out my washing machine whilst blowing through the usual retail brand nappies: Tena, Depends, all useless. I wondered how ANYBODY could get by with that rubbish (years later, working in the disability sector after the inevitable career-ending COVID layoff, I found that they DON’T work there either and people just leak on everything and/or get changed every 10 minutes). I settled on Molicare Premium Slip which then they promptly stopped making, substituting it for the not-nearly-as-effective Molicare “Elastic”. Abena L4 were the ok exception for "medical class" until the price literally doubled for them. I realised by then that ABDL products were just light years better and worked out cheaper because I used less of them. ABU Simples were great until the local shipping charges from their solitary supplier (lack of competition is a perennial problem in Australia) went bananas making them unviable for daily use. The nappies themselves were reasonably priced. It was absurd shipping charges that killed them. I then switched to BetterDry and they were good for a while before a series of breathtaking price increases and a sudden drop in quality saw me drop them for Rearz where I remain today for disposables.

100% Although I've not been inclined to build myself a changing table (because I like being married), I've repurposed a lot of Ikea furniture as our kids grew up and left home. A lot of it can be chopped and changed (no pun intended) fairly easily. A docking saw, a drill and an ethos of "measure twice, cut once" and you're away! I gave our kids Ikea beds for sure (sure they were cheap but the kids would destroy them anyway) but I baulked at those Ikea mattresses. I've seen thicker cheese slices. Cheese slices would probably be more comfortable to sleep on 🤣

This week I caught the bedwetting fairies red-handed. This is hardly new news but still, it was an interesting visitation of a type I’m not sure I’ve experienced before so I shall relate it. I was having a remarkably long, convoluted and vivid dream. In it, I was house-sitting overnight in somebody’s house. The house itself and the people I was minding it for kept changing abruptly as they do in dreams unbound from the concrete boots of reality. It was also a lucid dream. I knew it was a dream and that it wasn’t real whilst I was having it. I have these from time to time. At this particular juncture, these dream-people were supposed to be leaving me with the house to attend a party but the evening was drawing on interminably with them constantly finding some reason to further delay their departure. I looked at an old-school “flip-card” digital clock on their wall which read “23:44” and wondered what their party hosts would make of guests arriving well after midnight. Not my problem though. A long dissertation from them was underway from them about the requirements of their large and utterly-unruly dog that was cavorting about before me. It occurred to me that this dog would be of a lot less trouble when my friends had finally left so I could go about ignoring it from out in the backyard where it belonged. This was a dog that needed LESS attention, not more. I looked down to see that the reason that their unpronouncably-Scandinavianly-named wonder-pooch (the friends I was dreaming of HAD actually existed in real life, WERE Scandinavian and DID have a large, over-indulged-and-challenging dog), had stopped jumping on me was in order to have a pee on the carpet instead. It was an impressive quantity and I watched it pool and darken an implausibly-tartan floor. It occurred to me that this latest problem was technically out of my scope: my friends hadn’t left yet and it was THEIR carpet and THEIR dog. So I simply drew to their attention this latest problem pooling beneath their noses and amusedly waited for yet another departure delay. This is where it gets even weirder. I then became aware that I had started wetting my nappy but it wasn’t part of the dream. At some level, I knew this was happening back in bed tucked under the covers laying on my side. That I was wetting myself did NOT reflect in that dream at all. That was just a soggy sensory postcard from a distant reality. The dream-dog incident had resolved itself (because I had decided it so) and there was now new fussing to do with the car they were taking as I felt hot trickling and creeping warmth from pants back in a different mental dimension. I was aware that I was extremely comfortable back in bed and was utterly unbothered by my urinating in the midst of this complicated and somewhat-interesting dream. At some point this dream must have concluded and I lapsed back into deep sleep. Early the next morning I stirred. Grey, weak light was creeping in under the glass sliding door blind. I was STILL curled up on my left side. I was comfortable in bed but I could feel that my nappy felt quite wet. This was unusual. I was wearing a disposable. Disposables generally don’t feel wet, just warm. In particular, I could feel that the wetness was concentrated down one side and that my hip felt like it was resting in a bath. I could clearly recall both the complex dream and apparent pee incident that overlaid it somewhere. This recollection included the disturbing detail that I’d likely fully unloaded my bladder whilst laying on my left hand side. This is typically a death sentence for adult disposable nappies: something that clearly didn’t enter my head at all back when it happened. I wouldn’t do it if I were awake. I’d roll over. Nil desperandum: covering my nappy was my double-terry-lined plastic pants. I’d probably have some laundry to do but the bed should be ok. Some exploratory rummaging around inside those plastic pants revealed however that my Rearz InControl BeDry Night Premium (aka: “Colin”) had, amazingly, risen to this occasion. It was well-used but predominately on one side confirming my recollection. My hip WAS wet. There was a small amount of pee trapped between my skin and the un-padded plastic wing of my Colin but it had stayed there. Amazingly, my terry/plastic pants had remained dry. Colin had dealt with a fairly major nocturnal wee that happened 100% on my side and Colin held it. This was a remarkable effort. I’ve never seen an adult disposable nappy cope that well with this use case. Still, I wouldn’t make a habit of it. Colin is better but in the manner of adult disposable nappies, he is far from infallible. There were some other remarkable aspects to this incident. Firstly, I’d peed myself during some kind of bizarre sleep/dream-state. I didn’t decide to pee (that I was conscious of). I just became aware it was happening because I could FEEL it happening. Secondly, all of my conscious checks and balances were switched off. Despite being aware that I was laying on my side, I just remained in my somnolent state making no effort to stop or reposition myself and enjoyed the comforting physical sensations of a nappy getting wet around me. The thought of leaking simply never occurred to me. I don’t think I was even overtly aware that I was IN a nappy. I just knew that I was warm, comfortable and it was “ok” to pee. Thirdly, the nappy-wetting incident did not appear to directly manifest in my dream (the dog-on-carpet moment didn’t seem to have any obvious symbolism but perhaps it prodded the thought that I too could “go”). I’ve had pee-dreams before. Typically these have involved convoluted scenarios and sequences that attempt to rationalise that I’m about to pee my pants, or that I’ve just peed my pants or I’m in the ACT of peeing my pants whilst asleep in bed. In THIS situation, I simply became aware that I was wetting myself somewhere back in the real-world and at some level, I knew that was NOT part of a dream. I was informed but not consulted. It was actually quite pleasant – especially when I realised I had not leaked at all. A full shout out to Colin the wonder-nappy for surviving the adult disposable nappy torture test of a side-loading.

Nice analogy. I'm a serial-offender for over-analysing Bambi. I often wonder how much quicker "progress" could have been/would be if I could stop doing that. Still, it happens regularly enough now although still not every night. You should receive some kind of award for this! I can remember when I started out. I had to travel for business very frequently (pretty much every other week) and just 2 - 4 days of nappies largely deleted my luggage space. I've discovered that heat makes a big difference to how "wet" I will be. In my climate, the vast majority of the year ranges between warm and hot. "Winter" (such as it is) here is really only 6 - 8 weeks long and even then, daytime temps are usually between 20C and 25C but the nights are crisp. I actually tend to wear heavier day-nappies during winter. My at-home Active Airs may not run the distance. Interesting. There's a chance I might need to take a trip (my first since the pandemic) and if I do, it's likely to be a couple of weeks and managing my bedwetting will be a challenge. Did you re-use dry night nappies (so you could carry a smaller number) or how did you manage this? Did you end up reverting to bedwetting whilst still away or was the week #2 at your return home? This might give me some clues how to navigate here. In my case, this is due to a US-centric browser-side spell checker that hasn't responded to my (desultory) attempts to install a localised English dictionary.

🤣 - Seriously though, surely that would have to be pretty uncomfortable once that pee starts to chill down in there. You really *would* be wet down to your ankles for anything more than a few dribbles. It really does seem like a terrible idea. At least THESE ones aren't sold as day-wear: https://www.pjama.com.au/collections/adult AND they feature some kind of ankle-seal to stop the otherwise-inevitable fall-out...

Wow, THAT would have been an interesting conversation to start with a therapist! Did you have that story told in a thread somewhere? I'd be fascinated to read it. I suspect my beloved would like very much for me to visit a therapist but the objective would be to "cure" me...

And THIS is the truly maddening thing about this silly game. If you stop to count your chickens, the chickens go away... Ironically, if you decide move on with life and do something else: within a few nights you get chickens because, well because you weren't thinking about them. This maps into the kind of trap whereby if you plan to bed-wet you won't but if you go to bed without a nappy at some point, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week you wake up in cold wet sheets because you weren't thinking about it. This is where @Little Sherri and I find ourselves today. We know we will be dry some nights but we don't know which ones and the wet nights will be the ones when we're not thinking about it. This leaves our night nappies as effectively compulsory attire. It is a measure of the strangeness of our affliction that neither of us seem at all bothered by this 🤣

My experience has been that if once bedwetting starts to occur, you make no effort to interfere with it (ie: change behaviours either to avoid it or to test or monitor it) then yes, it will slowly progress. Having said that, some people never get to the "starts to occur" phase. Others, once it does occur, then (sometimes unintentionally) beat it back into retreat by over-thinking it (I did this for a while). It's an interesting question about the "point of no return". My experience once that I'd had ANY unplanned bedwetting incident, it was impossible for me to call out what I should or should not do to avoid it. It just happens. My experience is that it's not respecter of time or place. I don't "wet the bed" every night but it happens often enough and doesn't stop for nights in hotel or friends beds. If it's going to happen, it happens. For this reason, even though I still have "dry" nights, I MUST wear nappies to bed. I can't take the risk. It probably took 1 year of 24/7 to get to that point although actual bedwetting events remained rare. After 6.5 years, bed wetting still isn't every night but it's quite common now - alcohol nearly guarantees it.

Last Sunday night had been a “cloth” night. Old school: A kite-folded-and-pinned 60” x 60” terry towel nappy covered by opaque white plastic pants with just a compression pant over that so I could walk around the house with underwear that could laugh at gravity before bed. A “cookie monster” t-shirt that my kids had given me years ago as a laugh (very little can stand in the way between me and a packet of biscuits) completed my ensemble. I probably looked a little more “AB” than “DL” but this was more by accident than design. I’d gone to bed seven hours earlier with a warm wet spot at my crotch but in all probability, 80% dry. Waking in Monday-winter-dawn gloom, I noticed that my nappy was warm and wet all around me. Cloth nappies are like that. There’s no “stay dry” technology in cloth nappies whatsoever. When you pee in them, you feel wet. It’s not uncomfortable-wet though. It’s warm, snug and humid against your skin, like a wet-suit kind of wet whilst hopefully all outside of them remains dry. Rolling over in bed, I realised my nappy also felt, well heavy. Reaching behind I slipped a finger under the waist elastic of my plastic pants at the small of my back only to discover sodden terry towelling. If I was soggy up there, I was probably soaked. Clearly the bedwetting fairies had visited during the night. I couldn’t recall any kind of pee dream. I couldn’t recall anything really. I’d slept through the lot. The terry towelling had done its usual superb job of wicking pee evenly throughout the garment leaving me equitably damp across all of my nappy zone. This is in stark contrast to even high-end disposable nappies that have an unfortunate tendency to soak, swell and leak around the “ground zero” area leaving a goodly portion of that expensive SAP elsewhere in the garment with little to do. Still, I was warm, snug, empty-bladdered and had no particular reason to get up. This was one of those moments where I swear that even vanilla people could find a kind of decadent comfort in a well-fitted night nappy if only they could get past their psychological prejudices. It was at this point (0700 according to my bedside clock-radio) that the local council foliage-nazis fired up a battalion of leaf blowers in order to march down our short cul-de-sac ruthlessly blasting the few dozen fallen leaves one meter to the left of where they’d dropped. This apparently justifies the “beautification levy” imposed upon us by them whilst helping those same good citizens avoid the moral turpitude of sleeping in on a weekday. As the sound of several angry robot-mosquito-noise leaf blowers penetrated the dim gloom of our bedroom, the rising sun did its part: a sudden beam of pure, 6500K sunlight (I didn’t count them but say at about 126 million lumens) blasted in through our ensuite window, straight past the door that my beloved had forgotten to close when she’d left for the gym an hour earlier to roast my eyeballs at the exact spot where I’d left them on my pillow. Closing my eyes reduced the brightness just a bit. Like a brick landing in a crystal cabinet, morning had broken… I lay there for a few more minutes trying to pretend that I could doze despite the roar of garden equipment and the probability of getting sunburned in bed. Perhaps if I could just get up and shut the ensuite door. At least it would be darker in here. Sighing, I hauled myself up out of bed and padded damply across cold floor tiles to close the ensuite door. Just then, one of the leaf blowers howled a crescendo from somewhere startlingly close to our street-facing bedroom window: an anguished, Mechanoid cry as if it were aware of the Sisyphean futility of its own existence. Perhaps if I shut the window facing the street. Never mind that I was clad only in a Sesame Street t-shirt, saggy wet nappy and plastic pants. Window-ward I strode. Arriving there, I opened the plantation shutter to close the glass behind it only for a dusty fog of leaf-blower-raised pollen and debris wash over me. The hay-fever attack was instant. Fun fact: sometimes now when I sneeze, I wet myself a bit. Good thing I wear nappies I suppose. Several minutes and half a box of tissues later with an even-wetter night nappy, the hay-fever settled down and I looked longingly back at my bed. Perhaps I could STILL somehow achieve a sneaky brief doze. I clambered back in and as I pulled the doona back up over myself, hoping to recover some of the toasty warmth I’d been enjoying 10 minutes earlier, I felt the cool lower sheet against my bare thigh below my plastic pants. It felt very cool. And a bit wet. I’d evidently leaked a little. As everything around me was body temperature when I awoke, I couldn’t tell but a few minutes uncovered to the crisp winter morning air had chilled the damp spot of bedding down nicely. It was only a small wet patch with a diameter no more than a coffee cup but I was acutely aware that there was plenty more pee from where that came. The overwhelming likelihood was that a plastic pant leg elastic had ridden up during my tossing and turning allowing a small amount of damp terry towel to touch the sheet but it was also possible that I was by now too soaked for this nappy. A certain quantity of beer had been imbibed the previous evening. It was time to give up and carpe the Diem. Standing in our ensuite removing pins, the whole nappy and plastic pants affair slid down my legs to thud wetly on the shower floor. Still, it had been a spectacularly comfortable night nappy and I mourned its passing.

He doesn't look, well, committed...