Baby Talk

A little over 7 years now.  I don’t believe I’ve taken a full day off from nappies ever although rarely, I’ve tried a few hours here and there.  I did try to stay dry (albeit wearing a nappy) during a cyclone about a year ago but I got slightly damp anyway as it seems I dripped somewhere along the line.  I’m 95% “wet only” and have actively practised bowel control throughout those 7 years.     I would define incontinence as a spectrum of dysfunction that degrades or inhibits the ability to control one’s bladder and/or bowels. I would define myself as “marginally continent”.  I have bladder signals but they seem somehow muted.  I will dribble pee when relaxed but this stops if I concentrate.  It seems lately that sometimes I’m finding it harder to relax and permit pee but other times, I’m surprised to feel it happening.  I generally have a fair idea how wet I am but I’m increasingly forgetful about when pee events happened.  A running tap will almost always trigger pee.  On the odd occasion that I’ve “tested” myself (ie: tried to stay dry) I’ve found that urinary urgency usually manifests within 90 minutes or so and within 2 hours, I will be unable to concentrate on anything but NOT peeing. During the daytime I believe it could be done but I would need to remain very close to a bathroom.  A long car ride would require hourly stops but I'm ALWAYS in a nappy so it doesn't matter.  There is a residual anxiety in my head that my ability to remain dry would lapse if I stopped concentrating on remaining dry.  Wetting has become so automatic that I fear that I’d “forget” that I wasn’t in a nappy and an accident would happen.  It's getting VERY hard for me to remember what it's like not just to go in my nappy as I please. Obviously my partner knows.  Our kids have left home now so I don’t need to hide nappy-related laundry and anybody entering our walk-in-robe would immediately see nappy infrastructure.  Friends and family do not know.  I keep it to myself.  I’ve done sleep-overs and just make sure I wear enough nappy to be certain the bed will remain dry.     I’ve been to medical appointments in nappies but not where they would be exposed.  I have not discussed this with any practitioner although I suspect my dermatologist might be able to deduce it and I also suspect that some medical procedures would have allowed an observant practitioner to guess that I was diapered.  Sooner or later this is going to happen. Yes.  I wet the bed now.  This may well happen even if I’m not wearing a nappy (I’ve tested this!) so a nappy to bed is mandatory for me.  I still have “dry” nights but I don’t know when they will be so I can’t rely on them.  I’ve noticed long periods now where I’m wet every night. I probably have more wet nights than dry ones now. It's hard to be "aware" of peeing in your sleep: sometimes I will have “pee-dreams”.  Sometimes I will be woken up by my own wetting but many times I just wake to find my night nappy wetter than I can remember making it and I have zero awareness.  Sometimes I wake up during the night and wet my nappy.  I’ve noticed I NEVER “need” to pee either during the night or in the morning.  Somehow or another it gets taken care of.  I suspect I have rampant nocturia at this point and pee 3 - 5 times per night in small volumes.  I'm most likely to sleep through the earlier wettings during the night:  the 1am and 3am ones. I have no idea how I could stop this but it doesn't bother me.  It's nice never having to get up. Although I’d planned to keep it, it has degraded.  This was neither intentional nor desired but it happened anyway.  Mostly however I can stay clean but urgency can be a thing and if movements are “loose”, there can, and have been “accidents”.  It’s unclear in my mind if these accidents would still have occurred if I wasn’t in a nappy.  A part of my mind suspects that I might give-in more easily to urgency because I’m dressed to deal with it.  Sometimes I will fill a nappy because I don't want to stop what I'm doing, I'm on my own and I'm close to changing time anyway: maybe once a week or two.   Generally speaking, I wear TWO high capacity nappies per 24 hour period.  This has proved the cheapest and most effective solution for me.  The easiest nappy change is the one you avoid. Yes, I leak although a lot less than I used to.  I wear plastic pants over my disposable during the day. I try to wear cloth nappies for 3 days/nights per week to offset costs and environmental impact.  The laundry logistics are painful. It’s easy to under-estimate just how heavy wet disposable nappies are.  I have a nappy bin in our walk-in-robe that I empty twice per week.  Any longer and it’s too heavy to move. As I’m usually wet for long periods of time, skin care is very important.  I stay shaved down there.  I use rash cream at every change and ideally, I will rinse my nappy area with water at each change.      

PART ONE: It started, as many of these stories do, with a lifetime of accidents. Every morning, growing up I'd wake up to wet sheets. Well into my teens. There were a few dry nights, every now and again, but I was approaching adulthood by the time I was consistently dry every night. And that was largely at the expense of getting a good night's sleep. The bedwetting was bad enough, and was a reason I rarely got to go to sleepovers or residential school trips, but what was worse was the daytime accidents.  Wetting was rare. I didn't have good bladder control, but I didn't wet myself all that often - and I tended to wear dark clothes anyway, so no one would be able to tell. Unfortunately wetting wasn't the main problem. For most people, pooping yourself once or twice growing up is a humiliating experience that sticks with you for the rest of your life. For me it was so regular that I struggle to recall any specific accidents. More or less every day growing up, I would find myself with shit in my underwear. Sometimes it was a complete surprise - I didn’t even realise I’d pooped, sometimes it was because I was unwell, and diarrhoea got the better of me, but most of the time it was because I didn’t realise I needed to go until it was far too late to get to a toilet, and so I’d end up simply pooing in my underwear. Which was excusable for someone who was four, but was far more embarrassing when I was 14. It wasn't always a big accident, sometimes it was just a big skidmark that I could kind of clean up a bit and get on with my day - albeit smelling pretty bad - but usually I wasn't that lucky. More often than not I'd completely lose control and fill my underwear with poo. Then I'd panic, and pretend it hadn’t happened. And then someone would ask me if I’d had an accident, and I’d lie.Because how many teenagers would willingly admit to having pooped themselves? Usually my friends would be polite enough to pretend they believed me, but teachers and my parents would call me out. Then I’d be cleaned up, because I couldn’t be trusted to do it myself, all the while being told I was lazy, and too old to still be having accidents. On rare occasions, I was threatened with ‘incontinence pads’, but because they were presented as a punishment rather than a solution, I always argued against them. Which was utterly, utterly stupid, not only because they would have helped, but because while this was all happening, I would fantasise every night about being back in nappies. Eventually my parents took me to a pediatrician, who spent several years poking and prodding me, and giving me laxatives, until I eventually stopped having accidents. Except I didn’t. They were less frequent, at least for a while, and I did get in the habit of making myself go to the toilet whenever I felt even the slightest inclination that I might need to go, but I still couldn’t hold for very long. I just got better at hiding my accidents. And if I focussed enough, and worked hard enough, I could make it through a day without wetting or messing myself. It was just exhausting to do so. I ended up in a pattern where I would go several weeks without an accident, and with dry sheets, then eventually I would run out of energy and spend the next few days or weeks having uncontrollable accidents again. But by then, I guess, I’d got to the point in life where it was more awkward to make an issue of my accident than just ignore the lingering smell.  The bedwetting was still something of an issue, but between setting up an alarm to make sure I woke up at least once a night, and spending the latter part of the evening dehydrated, I managed to get the bedwetting down to once or twice a month, rather than six times a week.  You might ask yourself why I didn’t just wear nappies. It’s a fair question, particularly as I genuinely wanted to, and would occasionally buy some to wear for fun. But I think in part because of stigma around disability, and in part because I did have some control, it kind of felt like I didn’t ‘deserve’ them. Stupid, I know, but it made sense to me. For all the issues, I managed to have a fairly normal life. Holding down a job, having friends, and having romantic partners, but those relationships tended to go south relatively quickly. Usually as soon as I wet the bed one time too many, or had an accident that I couldn’t hide. It wasn’t that people were cruel, just that someone suddenly wetting their underwear in the cinema, or messing themselves while in a restaurant was a bit of a mood killer.  That was, until I met Jen. We’d been together for nearly three months, and miraculously I’d managed to avoid any accidents - at least any that she had noticed while we were out together. But I’d never spent the night at her’s, and I’d never invited her around mine, because of the inevitability of soggy sheets in the morning. She was surprisingly reasonable about that, she never pushed for me to stay over, and never nagged to come to mine.  Until that night. We had spent a really lovely day together. It started with lunch at hers, then movies on the sofa, and a little bit of fooling around, then went on to dinner. I made sure to take myself to the toilet every twenty minutes or so, and try to go, even if I didn’t feel like I needed to, and managed to avoid any accidents.  After dinner, we sat down to play some old video games. We got pretty competitive, and I was really getting into them. She beat me more than I beat her, and teased me about that. Which was pretty fun. Then I realised how long I’d been sitting there, and realised what that probably meant. After she kicked my ass at Mario Kart for the tenth or eleventh time, I excused myself and made a bee-line for the bathroom.  I knew what to expect as soon as I stood up, there was a warm sensation around my butt, and as I walked out of the room, I felt the sensation of a sticky mass between my cheeks, shifting with every step. The question wasn’t whether I had had an accident, but instead just how much of a disaster it was.  I shut myself in the bathroom and locked the door. As soon as I did, I noticed the smell. It wasn’t terrible, and there was a chance that Jen hadn’t noticed, but it didn’t leave me with much hope that this was cleanable. I unbuttoned my jeans, let them fall down around my ankles, and gingerly reached round to the back of my underwear. The smell was far worse now there wasn’t a layer of denim in the way. I lifted the toilet seat, and sat down onto the toilet as I eased my underwear down, so as to not have any loose poop fall on the floor. Then I looked down at the damage. There was a pretty significant mass of mushy mess covering the seat. I sighed, and with the sort of mechanical action that comes from a lifetime of repeating the same task, I yanked a few sheets of toilet paper from the roll, folded it into a wad, and began to try to wipe out the poo. It took me a few minutes to get the majority of the mess out, leaving a thick veneer of crap that would still smell and be uncomfortable, but was at least not as bad as when I started. I then moved on to myself, running each wad of toilet paper under the tap for a moment, to help make the cleanup more manageable. Eventually, after what felt like half an hour of wiping, I decided that I couldn’t hide in the toilet any longer, and gave up my futile effort to clean up all the mess. I could at least get out and go home without it being too obvious I’d pooed myself. As I pulled my underwear back up I felt the residual poop against my skin.. It was definitely a stop gap solution and not enough to be able to keep the evening going. I pulled up my jeans, and steeled myself to make my excuses and head home. “Are you OK? You were ages” Jen asked as I walked back into the living room.  “Yeah,” I said, not entirely believing it myself, “I should probably get going. It’s getting late.” She looked a little disappointed, “OK, you know you’re welcome to stay though,” I gave her a half-hearted smile. She wouldn’t be saying that if she knew what had just happened, “I know” I replied, “but I just realised I left a load of laundry in the washing machine, and if I don’t get home to hang it up I’ll have to do it again.” “You and that laundry” she joked. This was not the first time I’d used this as an excuse, “I’m going to have to get you some sort of sign to put up.”  “That might help” I agreed, a little less enthusiastically than she probably expected. “I’ll show you out” she said, getting up, “you still want to go see dinosaurs tomorrow?” Dinosaurs? The museum. I’d forgotten about that, “Yeah,” I replied, “that would be lovely.” We walked to the door, and as she opened it for me to leave, she leaned in for a hug and a goodnight kiss. I reciprocated, and enjoyed it, but as I did, I noticed her sniff slightly. I tried to play it cool, hoping that I was just imagining it. “Wow, I think I need to check the drains” she said, non-plussed, “It smells pretty bad out here.” I blushed a little, but hoped she didn’t see it in the dim hallway light,  “I’ll see you tomorrow” I said, as I headed out the front door.  My car was parked outside. I unlocked it, and got in. As I sat down, I shuddered a little as I felt the poop in my pants press against my skin.  Jen stayed at the door, smiling at me as she watched me get ready to go. I turned the key in the ignition. The engine chugged a little, but didn’t start. Damn. I tried again, No luck.  I glanced over at Jen, still standing at her front door. She looked concerned. I gave her a stupid grin and tried again.  The engine spluttered, but still didn’t start. I glanced back over at Jen, she was coming out of her house. Shit.  I wound the window down. “Everything OK?” she asked “Car won’t start” I replied. “Apparently so,” Jen said, “Come back inside, we can either call a recovery service” I froze for a second. I had no way of getting out of this, I was going to have to come back in. “Thanks” I said, trying my best to hide my apprehension, then got out of the car. Back in the house, I pulled out my phone, hoping to avoid Jen getting too close and smelling my accident. I started scrolling though, looking for recovery services. It was no use, everything was closed.  “You OK?” Jen asked. I realised I hadn’t said a word since I came back into the house.  “Yeah, sorry.” I explained, “Just worrying a little bit about the car.” Jen gave me a reassuring smile, “It’s late, why don’t you stay here and we’ll deal with it in the morning.” “I don’t have anything to wear to bed” I replied, “That’s OK,” she teased, “I don’t mind.” There was no way I was going to get out of this.I tried to find words, to either explain why I shouldn’t stay or to at least warn her about the risk  of an accident, but I couldn’t. Instead I gave a slightly terrified nod, and squeaked out an “OK”.  Jen gently guided me to sit down on the sofa, clearly trying to distract me from my concerns, placed a controller in my hand, and powered up Mario Kart again.”Time for a few more rounds before bed” she joked, “at least this way you don’t miss out on driving.” My competitive side took over, and I started playing, letting myself get absorbed in the game. I don’t know how long we played for, but it was definitely a while. It really was great fun, and I completely forgot about whatever it was that had been bugging me. Forgot about most things, really, until, after winning yet another race, Jen turned to me, and with a yawn, said, “I think it’s time we turn in for the night, otherwise we’ll be too tired for dinosaurs in the morning.” Suddenly I remembered that I was going to be staying here. In the same bed as Jen. She was going to find out that I was a bedwetter. Worse, as soon as I started to undress, she would also realise that I had pooped myself earlier. I stood up, hoping I could work out how to escape my fate, when I realised that my crotch felt damp. I guess Jen was getting the full trifecta of my accidents tonight. I must have glanced down when I realised I’d wet myself, because I saw Jen’s eyes move down to my crotch. I stood there like an idiot, expecting her to tell me to leave, possibly with a snide comment woven in. What I didn’t expect was for her to immediately give me a hug.  I stood there, not entirely sure how to react. “It’s Ok” Jen said, a soothing tone to her voice, “let’s go upstairs, and we’ll get everything sorted out.” I nodded, not entirely sure how to behave, as I’d never really had someone be nice to me when I’d had an accident before, but also painfully aware that the wet accident during the day that Jen was aware of was only the tip of the ice berg she was going to discover.  She led me into the bathroom, and turned the shower on to warm up. I didn’t want to take my jeans off and reveal my underwear while Jen was in the room, so I took my t-shirt off and hoped that she would leave the room. She didn’t. Instead she came over and stroked my arm,  “I know you didn’t just wet yourself.” she said, “I thought it might be easier if I helped you.” This threw me completely. I simply nodded, then stood still as she unbuttoned my jeans and let them fall to the floor, revealing my soaked and shit filled briefs. Apparently I had also pooped myself again while I was playing the game.  “Step out” she said. I did as I was told, slipping my feet out of my jeans. “Why are you being nice to me?” I asked, “aren't you disgusted?” “Because I like you, silly” Jen replied, “And it's not that bad. Besides, you couldn't help it.” It was hard to process this, particularly the idea that the load in my pants that was currently making Jen's bathroom smell like an overflowing sewer on a summer day wasn't disgusting.  She gave me a little kiss on the forehead, “stay here for a second for me” she said, before darting out of the room. I heard her run downstairs. On my own, I tried to reconcile what she had said. She already knew that I had pooped myself. Had she noticed my other accidents when I was around her? She came back in, a bin bag in her hand, she opened it out and put it on the floor. “Ok, step into this,”  I did as I was told.  “Im going to take your underwear off now, if that’s ok?” “I guess.” I said, uncomfortable at the prospect, but aware my options were limited. I should have been humiliated, but having my mess cleaned up was such a familiar experience for me, that I just did what I did growing up - accept it. I felt her grasp at the sides of my briefs and gently ease them down my legs, taking most of the mess that had been clinging to my butt with them. “Sorry,” I said, “I didn't realise it was that big an accident”  She giggled a little, “Yep, I’m afraid so. Is your tummy feeling OK?” This was it, an excuse. I could tell her I was feeling unwell, and that’s why I had an accident. And it would be an excuse for why we were going to wake up tomorrow morning in a wet bed, too. The problem was, if she had noticed accidents before, she would know that I was lying now.  “I think so” mumbled, the implication being that this wasn’t an out of the blue occurrence. “Good, I’d hate to think something I cooked you for dinner was making you feel bad,” she replied, taking a wad of toilet paper, wetting it, and wiping my shit-covered butt. I stood in silence as Jen cleaned the worst of the mess up, dropping all of the used tissues into the bag.  “Let’s get you in the shower” she said, guiding me over, and gently easing me under the water.  As I stood there, she stripped off her clothes, then climbed in with me.  “I thought this would be the easiest way,” she explained as she lifted the shower head down and directed it at my crotch, causing a spray of brown-tinged water to trickle down my legs. The warm water felt really nice as it cleaned my skin.  “I think you’ve got a bit of a rash developing,” Jen said, a very matter of fact tone to her voice, “How do you normally clean up after an accident?”  “I don’t normally have accidents” I protested, albeit without much conviction.  Jen straightened up, and raised an eyebrow, “I don’t think that’s true,” she said, “I’ve definitely noticed a few when we’ve been together.” I blushed.  “I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable by pointing it out,” she continued, “but it’s quite obvious from the smell when you’ve pooped.” I was mortified, If she had noticed, how many other people had too? “I’ve got a nose like a bloodhound.” she joked, “so anyway, how do you clean up?” “Just tissue, like you did with me,”  “And how long do you normally stay” she paused, trying to find the right word,  “dirty, before you clean up?” “It depends,” I explained, “as quickly as I can, but usually that’s just dealing with the main bulk of the mess, then cleaning it properly when I get home.” This confession made me feel like I was a child again, explaining my issues to doctors, and teachers.  “OK,” Jen sighed, “Maybe we can work out ways to make things easier for you in future,” That sounded… ominous.  Satisfied that I was now clean, Jen got out of the shower, and led me out with her. As she handed me a towel to dry off, she considered something, “Do your accidents just happen during the day?” she asked. I shook my head, a look of shame on my face. “I thought that would probably be the case,” she reassured me, “it’s not a problem at all, I just wanted to check.” She grabbed another clean towel as we walked out of the bathroom and into her bedroom.  She pulled the duvet back, and laid the towel out across the bed, at roughly the level my crotch would be at, “It's not an ideal solution, but it'll do for now” she said, “we'll work something more permanent out in the morning.” “You don't mind that I'm going to have an accident in your bed?” I asked, utterly incredulous, She shook her head, “Not tonight, no. I thought it was likely a possibility before I invited you to stay over.” “How?” “Like I said in the shower, I've noticed your accidents quite a few times,” she explained, “but the big indicator for the bedwetting was that you left a wet patch on my car seat when you fell asleep on the way home from the theme park the other week.” “Oh,” I replied. “You really don’t need to worry,” Jen said, climbing into the bed. I got in beside her. I wasn’t used to sleeping naked, and the towel felt a little uncomfortable against my skin, but it didn’t matter.  For the first time since I could remember, I had had someone look after me when I'd had an accident, and not make me feel terrible for it. I snuggled up to Jen, closed my eyes, and fell asleep.  

“That may be so but your still my grandbaby and your gonna stay that way.” Unfolding the baby diaper and slid it under and started to powder her up and brought the front panel up and tapes it shut.” And gave a light pat on her bottom 

For sure, but it changes how others are able to interact with the cops when their friend is being arrested for same.   

Nope!