Strange days indeed - a 24 x 7 experiment

[oznl]

5 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

 All our major venues have beer contracts locked up with the usual fizzy yellow macro-swill purveyors - there is sometimes one or two craft beer stands, among the 62 places to buy beverages, but you have to search for them, the line will be intimidating, and you'll pay $14 for your beer, but it will be half the size. I still do it, though. 

I refused to touch the solitary type of beer on sale ergo the cider.  Also, my beloved likes cider and a cup of that would go a little further than the thimbleful of cheap Chardy that she otherwise would have got.

Here in Nanny-alia, the beer at these venues is limited to mid-strength (for our own safety of course) and the prices are, as you describe, usurious.

AUD11.60 (CAD 10.20) for a small plastic cup of "XXXX Gold": a 3.5% ABV fizzy yellow swill!  It's hard to imagine that freight charges would have contributed to this robbery as the Castlemaine brewery at Milton is literally next door to Suncorp Arena where the concert was.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castlemaine_Perkins

Ergh...

Next cab of the rank for stadium-rock is "Foo Fighters" in mid December which will be a complete steam bath.

[Little Sherri]

17 hours ago, oznl said:

Next cab of the rank for stadium-rock is "Foo Fighters" in mid December

They are near the top of my list of bands to see, that I have not seen. I was supposed to see Bruce Springsteen this month but the concert got postponed because of some kind of medical issue he was having. Such are the waters we navigate, when the bands we want to see are fronted by people in their seventh or eighth decade. I assume The Rolling Stones have made a deal with Beelzebub, their souls in exchange for eternal youth for Mick Jagger's hips and Keith Richard's liver. 

[oznl]

Bowel control in extremis continues to display new limits to its owner in a week featuring not one but TWO dirty nappies I’d rather not have had.

Those of you following along my slow, chronicled descent into madness with this at best highly unusual lifestyle choice would know that bladder control is of little interest to me.  I don’t use it anymore, my nappies work better that way and at night, I sleep better when I don’t wake up to pee.

Bowel control however is a different ball game.  I value having bowel control in a similar way I value NOT having Tourette’s syndrome.   A wet nappy, or even a nappy wetting event out in company is nothing more than a naughty secret.  A loaded nappy is an olfactory grenade that is reflexively repulsive (due to excellent genetic selection) to bystanders and quite possibly the social rival of a good punch in the face.

Uninvited changes in the #2 department have however been creeping into my life irrespective of my pontifications on the topic.  All things being equal, I still have good control but any disturbance in the Department of Gastrointestinal Affairs and all bets are off now.

There were two of those this week…

The first night, not long home after work, I was dimly aware of an imminent need to go just before my usual evening nappy change.  The “good old days” of going like clockwork before breakfast at my morning nappy change are long gone it seems.

Nil desperandum.   It could wait an hour or so.

Twenty or so minutes later, I was laying on our bed chatting with my beloved pending doing something about dinner when quite suddenly, a growly cramp appeared.  Rapidly escalating out of nowhere, I was mid-sentence with my beloved when I realised that I was about to experience a dirty diaper and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

Steering into the skid (so to speak), I very abruptly bounced upright announcing that it was already late for me to be starting the dinner and fled the room.  It kind of WAS that time of evening so this excuse had a certain veneer of veracity although if she'd look carefully, she might have seen the doppler shift given the speed of my departure.

I hadn’t made it halfway down the hall before I’d completely filled my pants.

I had no choice but to waddle carefully downstairs and indeed, start the dinner.  Turning back and announcing that I'd changed my mind and could I please have the shower first didn't seem subtle.

It wasn’t so bad.  After she was done with her own shower, I plotted my route back upstairs past her allowing a 5 meter exclusion zone before stripping off my nappy (which was due for a change anyway), having a very long shower and then a fresh nappy.

The second event occurred during on Saturday mid-morning and was somewhat less convenient.

I was washing one of the cars when again, I experienced abdominal cramping.

Realising that time was of the essence, I headed back indoors only to discover my beloved industriously cleaning our bathroom de choix.  Slightly surprised to see her there I realised that these facilities may not be available for some time.  The fact that we have two other bathrooms in the house seemed to have escaped me.  We are creatures of habit.

In any case, the urgency of the need seemed to have abated in the face of my discovery.  I decided it could wait a while and went back downstairs to my car cleaning.

About 15 minutes later, out of the blue, round #2 appeared.  Violently.

I again headed indoors for the facilities, planning to slide down my nappy (an Abena L4 + booster), do the needful and get on with my day.  Almost instantly after closing the door behind me however, the severity escalated and I began, instead of purposely striding, a kind of butt-clenching penguin waddle towards the sanctuary of the upstairs toilet.

I hadn’t gotten halfway up the first flight of stairs before realising that despite my Herculean efforts at keeping Hell’s Gate closed, there had been, well, seepage.  My nappy was no longer just a bit damp.

I decided it must be salvageable and hastened my waddle to the top and then down the hall towards our bathroom.

As the bathroom door glittered and shimmered Xanadu-like in the oh-so-almost-tangible proximity, the Berlin wall at my bum collapsed under the force of the riotous horde behind it and again, I could feel the unmistakable sensation of content appearing in the seat of my nappy.   This however felt more substantial than a little leakage.

By the time I got the bathroom door open, I was well into the process of shitting my pants and there was nothing I could do to stop it.

At this point, the RATIONAL thing to do would have been to realise the futility of my quest, give into biological inevitability and just finish the deed safely, and relatively comfortably in my nappy before coming up with some strategy of changing what would doubtlessly be Satan’s peanut-butter sandwich in some semblance of privacy, potentially even (with yard work) later that morning.

No.  I decided that instead, I could STILL salvage my recently-donned nappy by pulling it down quickly, planting my backside swiftly onto the toilet seat and concluding festivities on the throne.

The scale of mess involved with pulling down one’s nappy half way through an unstoppable filling cycle was commensurate with stupidity of the decision to attempt it.

Now I had:

1.       A hopelessly-trashed Abena L4/booster that couldn’t be left on the property, let alone on me

2.       Contaminated plastic pants

3.       Contaminated shaping shorts

4.       Contaminated toilet seat

5.       Contaminated floor

6.       6 minutes to resolve issues #1 through to #5 before my beloved sent out a search party

I briefly considered the advantages of Hogwartian Apparation.  Digging a tunnel to escape wasn’t really an option.  I was on the third floor.

I dealt with things as best as I could.  I honestly don’t know WHAT I could have done to clean myself up without the hand shower in close proximity.  My nappy, which 10 minutes earlier was obviously a complete write off as was much of my lower clothing.  I had to cache soiled garments in my study nappy bin until I could sneak it down with my usual weekend nappy washing.  If my beloved noticed my protracted bathroom visit and clothing change, she had the diplomacy to keep it to herself.  I did accidentally leave a (well rinsed fortunately, but still wet) pair of compression pants in the shower, a faux pas she lovingly responded to by stuffing the wet garment in my t-shirt drawer.

Whatever.

To date, ALL of these events have happened in some at least semi-safe environment just on the cusp of something resembling safety.  This strongly resembles the described “latch key incontinence” whereby urge incontinence manifests at the first hint of refuge (but slightly in advance of management).

So what happens if this progresses and it happens somewhere that I’m NOT able to deal with it?

I don’t know.  I'd rather not find out.

[Stroller]

1 hour ago, oznl said:

So what happens if this progresses and it happens somewhere that I’m NOT able to deal with it?

I had a Joan Baez moment on reading this. 'There but for fortune go you or I'.  I've been so close to this many times but never had the full nappy experience apart from a couple of times walking Binky when I couldn't make it home in time.  Both times I came home to an empty house so I could clean myself up OK.  It's a bit more work when you're in a cloth nappy.  Many times I've only just made it to the bathroom in time - the urge usually comes on just after my breakfast & it's the trigger to change out of my overnight nappy & get dressed.  Occasionally there's a bit more than skidmarks.

Sooner or later I'm going to get caught out.  It'll then be the time to accept and possibly make public that I'm functionally incontinent and it'll be awkward wherever it happens.  I'm pretty confident my other half will be OK with it, provided it's not a daily occurrence, but of course you never know.  Possibly it'll be that back-breaking straw, but she's not a camel, so I doubt it.  She's not shown any signs of strain coping with my AB life in a long while.

Anyway, I've got confidence I'll be able to cope with it, one way or another.  And confidence you'll be able to as well.  It won't be pretty though, for either of us.

[jeremy12312]

12 hours ago, oznl said:

There were two of those this week…

Just curious if these were both, um, troubled digestive situations?  Like, something wasn't sitting right?

[oznl]

1 hour ago, jeremy12312 said:

Just curious if these were both, um, troubled digestive situations?  Like, something wasn't sitting right?

Yes.  Both were although there was zero nausea.  Just something that kind of "went through" relatively quickly.  If things are normal down there, control works well but if something is a bit off, I might now struggle to stay clean.

Ironically, I'm (a bit) better at keeping dry.  This isn't an expected outcome.

12 hours ago, Stroller said:

 I've been so close to this many times but never had the full nappy experience apart from a couple of times walking Binky when I couldn't make it home in time.  Both times I came home to an empty house so I could clean myself up OK. 

I'm wondering if your commentary there might reflect some goal posts that have moved a long way.

For me at least, in the "before times" before full-time nappies became normal, an uncontrollable pants-pooping event would have been an unthinkable catastrophe.  It would also be something that hadn't occurred since I was 4 years old.

Compare and contrast that to now where things are more like "oh, yeah...  It doesn't happen EVERY day but if things are a bit disturbed down there, that's something that happens from time to time."  There are some eerie parallels there to "oh yeah, it's happened a couple of times walking the dog".

Australians over 50 get regular free screening for the big "C" in the bowel department (and I choose to participate in this screening) so I'm fairly confident there's nothing sinister going on down there and 97% of the time, things are normal.

It's possible this is psychological insofar as I KNOW that I'm in a nappy and that this is both an operational barrier to "going" (having to be removed with attendant risk of damage/leakage) and also mutes (somewhat) the price of failure (although I managed to snatch defeat from THOSE jaws of victory on the most recent event).

The other possibility is that that control has actually degraded despite me engaging in no pursuit for this. 

Whatever it is, I now find myself in the situation where an occasional full nappy is an unavoidable outcome.  They should publish a warning on the tin or something.

[FretaBWet]

It seems like your strategy of using onsies and compression pants to make your diaper invisible is working directly against you when you have a #2 emergency. Unfortunately it seems to fix one you have to sacrifice the other. Not a good situation to find yourself in.

Hugs,

Freta

[jeremy12312]

5 minutes ago, oznl said:

Yes.  Both were although there was zero nausea.

I had a weird one last night, for the first time ever.  It wasn't completely unexpected I guess because, well, I was intentionally pooping my pants.  But a few minutes after the intentional push, a second wave came and decided to let itself loose on its own, and I distinctly had the "hey, I didn't authorize that" terror.  

 

8 minutes ago, oznl said:

They should publish a warning on the tin or something.

Somewhere in a mystical trinkets shop, a monkey's paw curled one of its fingers.

[ozziebee]

Yes, that is the problem that I find too. I’m now normally in cloth nappies, using snappies/boingo clips to hold the nappy in place, nice and tightly. Over that is a fixation pant, and over that is a pair of plastic pants. I tuck the leg elastic in under the cloth nappy. 

Over this would then be a onesie, and then my clothes. 

So taking all this off in a hurry to do a #2 is not a quick task. Thus, in the grand scheme of things, sometimes ya just gotta accept the bad with the good. 

[Stroller]

10 hours ago, oznl said:

The other possibility is that that control has actually degraded despite me engaging in no pursuit for this. 

For me, this has definitely happened.  The key question for me is whether this is physical or psychological.  Or both.  The muscle activity I used to use to control my wetting I no longer use.  This is the same muscle activity I used to use as part of my toolkit to hold back no. 2 when urgency struck.  I've trained myself not to use these muscles at all, as far as possible, and I'm not going to change that.  So it's not surprising my bowel control is not what it was. What I don't know is whether those muscles still work effectively. I've no intention of finding out either.  My goal was always to lose control of wetting entirely, and I'm not going to do anything to fight against that.  It's too important to me.

[oznl]

12 hours ago, ozziebee said:

Thus, in the grand scheme of things, sometimes ya just gotta accept the bad with the good. 

That's all very well until you're having metaphorical tea and cucumber sandwiches with the vicar when the bad rolls into town 😆

[Little Sherri]

This illuminating, and also disturbing, along the lines of someone you know owning, say, the same car you do, and you both have 8 year payment plans on it, but they bought theirs a year before you did, and now they're having notable transmission problems... and yours makes a weird thunk when you put it in reverse once in a while, but otherwise hasn't acted up. But it's in the back of your mind now. 

I've had a couple of "events" in that department, which, to @oznl's well-worded point, is not something most people can say about ourselves if we add the qualifying "since I was four".  To me, so far, their etiology as been psychological, not physiological - mutiny, basically, on the good ship #2, inspired by viewing events across the harbour on ship #1. 

Here I am, in any case, blasting past a road sign warning of a curve, without applying the brakes, on the blind assumption that the curve in my personal road is a gradual one, and that there is no precipice on the far side of it... 

[oznl]

I had to buy more nappies last week.  This is an occupational hazard with my lifestyle.  It was still a sobering experience.  The cumulative recommended retail price for my three cases of nappies ran to more than AUD530.  Padded out as it is (me so clever) by my opportunistic use of cloth at weekends and my dwindling collection of free Abena L4, the 132 new nappies that this “investment” provides should sustain me for a bit over three months.

At least I didn’t pay RRP which made things slightly less ghastly.  I’m in the fortunate position of living close enough to drop by in-person to one of Australia’s tiny number of ABDL nappy retailers and save a substantial sum on packing, freight and associated labour.  It was still a big chunk of change to convert into pee-soaked landfill though.  I know my beloved will see this on my account statement.  She probably won’t say anything but she can think quite loudly.

My “BetterDry” goto-daily (nightly) driver nappy has, since I commenced this strange journey, gone up (swollen?) in price by a factor of around 36%.  It has also I suspect, become fractionally less functional but that story for another time.

It’s harder to tell with Rearz: their plethora of models and love of change makes it hard to get a fix on any one product over time.  Their venerable “Barnyard” product however suggests a more modest (but far from insubstantial) 20% hike.

I do wonder how fiscally sustainable all of this will be into a long-haul future.  Things are ok for now with my “semi-retirement” level of employment (with associated semi-remuneration) but full retirement is chronologically speaking, just around the corner.  There, I will be restricted to passive income which to be frank, has (especially in the face of inflation), been offering fairly woeful returns for some years.  Furthermore, I won’t have the cover of work to sneak off and buy nappies over-the-counter. I will be living at least an hour’s drive away from my nearest nappy-pusher and secondly, my beloved will be hovering just behind me at all times.  She’d want to go with me and then want to know where it was we were going.   I’d expect that around 800 milliseconds after that disclosure,  I’d either be going nowhere, going somewhere else, or going alone to get my nappies anyway but returning to face spousal permafrost and possible lock changes.

What happens when we fast forward another twenty years after that?

Life’s autumn will turn to winter and frailty.  Before you can say “death and taxes” I’ll be uncomfortably leaking through dismal institutional depends whilst gazing at an institutional ceiling from an institutional bed the size of an execution gurney.  Nearby, but tragically outside of my stabbing range, some minimum-wage, mindlessly optimistic care-worker will be banging out Christmas carols on an out-of-tune piano in our fluorescently lit, vinyl-floored communal room that smells permanently of pee and lamb chops.  Clustered around, a flock of wheelchair bound grannies smile and rock vacantly in time to the barely-recognisable-but-curiously-prescient “Silent Night”, all drooling from one end and dribbling from the other.  I run to death, death runs as fast, and all my pleasures are as yesterday…

Ok, that got a bit dark.

So what better thing to do this week than “upgrade” my daily work nappies to a more expensive model?  Who cares about tomorrow?  I’m just a dog running on a beach and I don’t know what tomorrow is!

I like my Rearz Incontrol Elite Hybrid (aka “Barry”) nappies a lot.  Regardless, there has been a minor-but-ongoing issue of 4pm “slightly damp rear right thigh” pretty much out of the gate with them.  I’ve moderated it a little with their re-sizing (forcing me to re-size up to an XL) but the problem still persists in miniature.

Cue the Rearz Inspire+ “mega”.  With almost cloth-like voluptuousness, I find these to be probably the most comfortable kind of pants to pee in short of pinned terry towel ones.   Although the early versions I found to be prone to sudden (and near catastrophic) leaking, the new “mega” version offers prodigious (albeit nowhere near their long-lunch-chardonnay-fuelled market claims) capacity meaning that to date, they’ve proven to be impossible to leak in for a 12 hour shift.  God knows I’ve tried.

I’ve had a pack or so on hand of the “Inspire+ Mega” as a kind of “treat nappy”, or for a more sober application, to manage overtime-shifts where the Barry might be pushing its luck.

Upon doing my fiscal homework however, when bought by the double-case (the most inexpensive way to purchase), the price difference between 72 Barrys and 72 of the Inspire+ Mega is about AUD5.00 or, put more optimistically, around AUD0.13 per unit (about USD0.09).

Putting to one side the hedonistic pleasures of unfettered, unleakable and unobserved pants wetting, paying an extra $5 to keep the office chair perfectly dry for a couple of months really is a kind of community service.  Their bulk is manageable. My bum is the only bit of me that doesn’t need to lose weight and my Kevlar compression pants also do their bit to flatten the not-insubstantial-when-soggy puffiness.

Currently I choose to wet mega Inspire+ nappies whilst at work now.  I can drink a whole fish tank before breakfast and it’s still awesome on my chair seat.

How all this will work in 2053 is a question for later.

[Little Sherri]

On 11/23/2023 at 7:34 AM, oznl said:

Cue the Rearz Inspire+ “mega”.  With almost cloth-like voluptuousness, I find these to be probably the most comfortable kind of pants to pee in short of pinned terry towel ones. 

I love them too. I actually missed their Black Friday to Cyber Monday sale this year, wherein they were 35% off. I would have bought two cases, even with the consternation that would bring when I have to expand the borders of my two-shelving-unit diaper habit into a two-and-a-quarter-shelving-unit diaper habit. At $100 CAD for 36, I feel I could have defended my position. But, alas, I was travelling, and didn't have my personal computer with me, and I felt it unwise to place such an order on my work laptop or phone. I suppose I could, were I challenged on it, say that they're for my mother-in-law or whatever, but then I'd be getting "Adult Pacifier Sale!!" emails coming up in my Outlook notifications during presentations. 

[oznl]

This week it was time for my annual skin cancer check.  I’m a “frequent flyer” in the skin cancer department and having had the pleasure of its company in its most lethal garb (malignant melanoma), this check is done annually by a specialist instead of a general practitioner.

Yet again I squibbed out and didn’t wear a nappy for this.  It’s not like I could have hidden it I suppose.  Skin cancer checks don’t work that way.

Dimly aware that it’s possible, if I remain on this trajectory for long enough, that I may reach a place going there without my nappy will no longer be a socially acceptable option, this nettle may at some point need to be grasped.  Still, I dreaded the professionally-unremarked-upon-but-inescapably-noticeable pause in conversational banter when “stripping to your underpants” revealed a fairly industrial-strength adult nappy.  There was also the heart-achingly painful foresight that he’d have to peer inside it at some point too.

I thought that since I COULD, I SHOULD delay that awkward moment until a later time: such as when one of us is dead.

The appointment was, in accordance with my chosen preference, an early morning one.  I would be able to sneak out in the early am, get the job done, get back home, change back into a nappy and get to work no more than 90 minutes or so late, time that I’d already effortlessly made up for them.

It was odd, changing out of a nappy and into my solitary pair of surviving underpants.  My jeans felt like an empty house and with nothing to catch on, they had a tendency to slide down.  In an abundance of caution, I folded a 2’ x 2’ baby’s terry nappy and stuffed it into the front of my underpants.  It wouldn’t hold an entire wee but it would stop the odd drip or dribble should one occur.  I planned to yank that out prior to entering the waiting room.

That “lifeboat” nappy might also provide some reverse-camouflage for my beloved: concealing the fact that I was in fact nappy-free that morning.  I worry that she would still seize upon any hint of my yielding territory in this matter to re-engage with open warfare.

It was only a 15 minute drive from my home to the specialist.  By the time I’d parked my car at the suburban shopping mall that hosted his rooms, I needed to pee.  I’d been out of a nappy for about one hour.

Ditching my emergency padding in the car, I headed to the mall and used the facilities.

I wasn’t about to wet myself but I was uncomfortable.  Unsurprisingly, there was probably only half a cup or so of actual pee.

Thusly drained I proceeded to his waiting room and was seen shortly thereafter.

 About 45 minutes later I departed sporting a multi-hundred dollar dent in my bank balance and a fresh cryotherapy wound: another bee-sting-sized memento of the bitter-sweet legacy of growing up under those huge, shockingly-blue, sun-blasted Australian skies.

I needed to pee again.

I decided that since this would be the third pee in less than two hours (I’d made a point of completely emptying my bladder into my night nappy before changing), it could wait for the 15 minute drive home.

My plan was to put on my work nappy and just pee in that as I drove back to work but by the the time I got home, “latch key urgency” was making itself known.  I didn’t think I was about to wet myself but I was far from comfortable and no longer trusted myself to stay dry through finding and putting on a nappy.

For the second, record-breaking time in one day, I peed in a toilet.

I then changed into a Rearz InControl Hybrid Elite (aka “Barry”: I did not wish to waste an Inspire+ on a short shift), re-dressed and headed to work.

I had to wet my nappy a little on the drive there, less than 15 minutes after peeing after getting home!  It wasn’t an “accident” as such but it became immediately and swiftly obvious that if I wanted to be comfortable down there, I was going to get a little bit wet.  These bouts of sudden urgency followed by small spurts of pee continued on for much of the morning.  I was very grateful to be back in a nappy because having to use a toilet for all these micro-events would have been intensely annoying and very time consuming.

So there we are.  I wasn’t incontinent though.  I didn’t EXPECT to be incontinent but (and I was only out of nappies for a little more than two hours) but it seemed that my holding ability had markedly deteriorated from my last nappy-free sojourn.

Perhaps this is a new normal, perhaps today was a bad day.  Whatever though, if you want to go on a car ride with me, make sure I’m in a nappy first.  At best we’d be stopping a LOT.

[Little Sherri]

On 11/30/2023 at 7:32 AM, oznl said:

if I remain on this trajectory for long enough, that I may reach a place going there without my nappy will no longer be a socially acceptable option, this nettle may at some point need to be grasped.  Still, I dreaded the professionally-unremarked-upon-but-inescapably-noticeable pause in conversational banter when “stripping to your underpants” revealed a fairly industrial-strength adult nappy.  There was also the heart-achingly painful foresight that he’d have to peer inside it at some point too.

I haven't had a "pants off" moment with my primary care physician in a few years - he's not very proactive. That may cost me my life someday, but, it takes the pressure off. Checkups are quick and painless. He's been my doctor since I was a teen and is WAY past due for retirement, so I suspect he has a gambling problem, or hates his wife. My plan for a while has been to wait him out, then get a new doctor, and at that point, say to Dr. New that I've had an overactive bladder for years, went down some conversational roads with my previous doctor, visited a urologist (technically true, although it wasn't for OAB), and that I've decided wearing protection is preferable to some weird catheter contraption or taking medication with side effects, end of conversation. 

But in the meantime, I've been pants-down in a "product" in front of a physician (and a resident) once - ironically, a urologist. I was there on another matter and naively thought there would be no pants dropping, since it was all about bloodwork, but nope, he really wanted to jam his finger into the place things shouldn't be jammed, and also, to manipulate my family jewels. It was a downtown doctor's office I'd never been to, in a big city, up in a high rise building, where you parked a kilometer away, for $25, so I wore a drab grey Depends adult pull-up, just in case, and I had a diaper in my laptop bag for afterwards. I had no idea if his waiting room policy was to let us stew or to see us more or less on time. 

SO there I was, sliding my jeans down in front of his professionally disinterested gaze, to reveal my grey man-diaper. I thought for sure there would be questions - he's a urologist - but, nope, not a word. It wasn't in the notes, so it wasn't on his radar. That gives me some comfort that the doctors in my future will be too busy to care that I wear plastic disposable underpants. 

[ppdude]

16 minutes ago, Little Sherri said:

I haven't had a "pants off" moment with my primary care physician in a few years - he's not very proactive. That may cost me my life someday, but, it takes the pressure off. Checkups are quick and painless. He's been my doctor since I was a teen and is WAY past due for retirement, so I suspect he has a gambling problem, or hates his wife. My plan for a while has been to wait him out, then get a new doctor, and at that point, say to Dr. New that I've had an overactive bladder for years, went down some conversational roads with my previous doctor, visited a urologist (technically true, although it wasn't for OAB), and that I've decided wearing protection is preferable to some weird catheter contraption or taking medication with side effects, end of conversation. 

 

Last physical examination had no pants down. I found that odd and asked the doctor why I didn't have to strip. She said "We don't do that anymore."Darn!!!

 

[oznl]

 

This week I’ve been getting used to wearing my new Rearz Inspire+ “mega” under work shorts.

It hasn’t been a clean break with my trusty (well, mostly) Rearz InControl Hybrid Elite (aka: “Barry”) nappies as I have a couple of packs left to work my way through.  I’ve just been stringing them along a bit, alternating between Barrys and Inspire+ Mega for those workdays that have historically proven “challenging” for my Barrys.

Those Inspire Mega+ are big nappies.  They don’t get any smaller after peeing in them for 12 hours either.  They’re also (somewhat) noisy.  There are some fairly distinct crinkling noises upon first attiring and removing the tapes sounds like some kind of Inquisitorial torture technique.  I can see what I’m wearing under my shorts but I KNOW what I’m wearing and nobody around me has ever seen my silhouette sans nappy anyway.  Regardless, I’m relying heavily on my compression shorts and plastic pants to maintain as much visual and acoustic discretion as possible.

Those noisy tapes only remove once too, usually taking suitably incompatible-with-life sized chunks of the host nappy with them upon removal.  Once they are taped on, they are staying on.  I’m dimly aware that with my slightly denuded #2 control, I may well end with some inconvenient consequence of their relative immovability at some point but my plan is to try very hard at staying nice for my co-workers.

In addition to their superb, cloth-like comfort, they definitely out-perform Barry.

Whilst mostly good, some of the more “extreme” days would see minor Barry seepage, almost invariably around the seat at the back of my thighs. 

Assuming we are wearing a reasonably well-engineered ABDL nappy (the concept of a well-engineered medical adult nappy being evidently oxymoronic), the typical failure mode is one of containment rather than outright absorbency.  You will spring a leak somewhere long before all of the available absorptive media has been saturated.  Barrys leaked (when they leaked) because of pee bypassing available absorbent material.

Previous analysis has suggested that this was actually pee escaping my nappy at my crotch before following gravity to a kind of sartorial drain hole down between my legs where the seams of my plastic pants are lowest.

The torture test for a night nappy is peeing whilst laying on one’s side.  I haven’t tried this in an Inspire Mega, partly because I don’t wear them at night and partly because I have no particular expectation of them surviving.  It seems that vulnerability to lateral leakage is endemic in adult disposable nappy design.

The torture test for a day nappy is sitting on a bench or chair all day peeing in them.  This is where Barry almost invariably struggled by about 3pm.  The leakage was never bad to the point of really needing to do anything but it would be nice to finish the day with perfectly dry jeans.

“Sitting on my bum” days have been rare however since my semi-retirement job does involve a fair amount of physical moving around in a workshop or a warehouse.  For the most part they have occurred whilst driving vehicles long distances.  Recently however, my employer’s entreaties for me to jump-start some of my “former life” skills to help them with some business process challenges have seen a sharp up-tick in arse time.

The Inspire+ Mega handles an entire, well-hydrated day on my anonymous black office non-executive-style chair with aplomb.  It may indeed feel like I’m wearing a swimming flotation device stuffed into my pants by 4pm but so far, everything has been dry on the outside.

Yesterday I had one of those “sitting on your bum in a vehicle all day” gigs that involved a 630km round commute for a couple of hours work.

In the past, these are the events that took Barry to the edge of catastrophe.  It was not unheard of for me to arrive home sitting on some kind of protective seat cover (our vehicles carry tools and some degree of PPE so these things are routinely available to drivers).

The Inspire+ held up well, nearly perfectly.

There was a minor moment on my lunchbreak.  Attempting to enjoy what McDonalds call “hamburgers” at some regional city, I was relaxing on their famously designed-to-be-comfortable-for-20-minutes-only seats.  Upholstered in the finest bright yellow fibreglass it was as hard as their burgers were bad for you.   It was probably unsurprising that upon rising, my first (and by now automatic) quick nappy check revealed a tiny damp patch at the rear.

The problem was that I had a 4 hour drive ahead of me.

A quick diversion to the washroom confirmed that my Inspire+ had loads of capacity remaining.  There had (somehow) been one of those very minor lateral leaks that seemed to have occurred whilst I was seated.  I was definitely dry (on the outside) when I went in and I’d been sitting in the vehicle (albeit with slightly more comfortable seats) with no problem.  I believe I may have peed at some point sitting at lunch whilst my nappy was compressed into a cheese-slice consistency on the passive-aggressive Golden Arches hard outdoor seat.  I couldn’t remember peeing but these days I often don’t.  It’s voluntary (usually) but so automatic now that later I sometimes can’t recall where and when those events happened.  This is to the extent where I often find myself wet without specific recollection of how I got to be that way now.

 I rearranged my plastic pants as best as I could and got back into the vehicle to hope for the best.

The best happened.  It proved to be an isolated occurrence.  The Inspire+ survived the 4 hour return trip under live fire with absolutely zero incremental leakage.  It MUST have been a function of my rock-hard McChair.

Despite the relative bulk, their superb comfort and extreme reluctance to leak means that I’m staying with my Inspire+ for now.

Oh, and “Happy Birthday” Strange Days chronicle.  Now you are 5.

[BabyJilly_S]

Press out leaks are the bane of existence...  

As a sedentary office type they are my nemesis.

Oh, and gratz on the anniversary!

 

[oznl]

Last night was a pretty solid night for bedwetting action.

Truth be told, alcohol may have had something to do with this.  I’m not sure how it happened but sometime after 2 or 3 7% ABV craft beers morphed into glasses of Cabernet Merlot, I found myself at bedtime to be watching old David Bowie concerts on YouTube (last night was his excellent “Glass Spiders” tour).  Music videos played loudly at bedtime is usually a sign that I’m suitably refreshed and could probably do to switch to water.

At least I could remember what dross it was I was watching…  That tells me that things could have been worse.

I’d changed a couple of hours before bed into a BetterDry fortified by a decent booster pad.

I’d been wearing it in the chair before bed for those couple of hours so in all probability, I would have been a little bit wet by the time I got into bed but I had absolutely zero recollection about that.  Following my usual routine, I would have stripped off my shorts, pulled on some heavy-terry-lined plastic pants over my (damp) disposable, cleaned my teeth and waddled off to bed.

Next thing I knew was that it was light and there were voices in the room:  it was the clock radio inviting me to start next week with the 6am doom bulletin.  As I listened to the litany of global disasters that were on schedule to overtake my life for the days coming I realised two things:

1.       I had an empty bladder

2.       I was laying on my back and my bum felt wet

It takes a lot to make a well-engineered adult disposable nappy such as a boosted BetterDry feel wet (nearly two litres in my case).  They devote a lot of engineering effort to avoiding such outcomes. 

A cautious finger poke check reassured me that the bed was dry.  So were my pyjamas.  Even the inside terry lining of my plastic pants seemed ok.  It was just my nappy that was very wet.

10 minutes later, standing in the bathroom, it slid to the floor with a dull “thud” after undoing the two top tapes.  Dark, swollen and heavy, it had clearly seen a great deal of overnight action.

I could remember NONE of that action even though I could remember my YouTube concert fairly well.  Not even a blurry “pee dream”. Amazingly, I couldn’t even recall waking through the night either which something I routinely do 2 – 4 times).  I just slept. 

It seems I fell into bed at around 10:45pm in a slightly damp nappy before sleeping for an uninterrupted 7 hours during which time I would probably have peed at least three times.  The only insight I had was the “sitting in a tepid birdbath” sensation in my pants upon waking.  My bladder hadn’t given stirred me at all during the night, apparently just voiding automatically as the need arose.  I didn’t even need a morning pee when I woke.  It seems I’d already had it.

If that’s sleeping like a baby I’ll take it.  It’s brilliant but of course, the best way NOT to have a night like that is to plan to have one.

[Little Sherri]

On 12/11/2023 at 2:14 AM, oznl said:

I just slept.

This phenomenon has, on occasion left me contemplating the long-term repercussions of getting up at 1 AM and having a Scotch on, say, a Monday night. I haven't done it. But I know it would work. Alas, one midnight Scotch becomes two midnight Scotches, becomes a waterglass of discount mouthwash at 10 AM...

On 12/7/2023 at 7:12 AM, oznl said:

Yesterday I had one of those “sitting on your bum in a vehicle all day” gigs that involved a 630km round commute for a couple of hours work.

In a Big Country by Big Country comes to mind. This is also a Canadian phenomenon. We have 10 provinces and 3 territories. I can drive for 24 hours and still be in my home province of Ontario. I don't do a lot of driving for work these days, but I believe my record for one day was 1400 km, in a diesel-powered German cruise missile. That's for work. I've driven 2200 km in one day in pursuit of recreation. Americans can identify with this as well, whereas in Europe, driving for 14 hours takes you through five countries.

Another thing that Australia and Canada have in common is that, depending on which route you've chosen, and the season, your car sometimes becomes equivalent to a space capsule, or a sailboat in the middle of the ocean - it's a life support machine. If your fuel pump fries itself 7 hours into the wrong 14 hour journey, you could very well die out there, although for different reasons. Fun fact - hypothermia, in the end stages, sometimes causes people to experience a burning sensation, such that they take their clothes off. 

[ozziebee]

I saw the curvature of the Earth on my most recent roadtrip, way out in western NSW.  The road was dead straight (we'll get to this in a minute), and trees lined both sides of the road.  As I was driving, I realised that the trees slowly dipped down to the horizon _way way way_ off in the distance, but didn't merge at the point where the road would be (there was a faint gap between the tree line on the left hand side, and the tree line on the right hand side).

The road itself was flat.  Wanna see?  On Google Maps, do a search for the B71 Mitchell Highway between Nyngan and Bourke, in NSW, Australia.  Apart from a couple of corners, the road itself is dead straight.  For hundreds of kilometres.

With Emu and goats lining both sides, just to keep said driver concentrating

[Little Sherri]

On 12/7/2023 at 7:12 AM, oznl said:

Oh, and “Happy Birthday” Strange Days chronicle.  Now you are 5.

Congratulations, by the way! Thank you for continuing to chronicle your experiment, half a decade after you started. It's an always-articulate and often hilarious serial that keeps me coming back. You have a particular gift - you linguistically and intellectually pick up and rotate things, both profound, and mundane, so that light catches their facets in interesting ways. 

[oznl]

Last weekend I experienced “range anxiety”: in a Rearz “Mermaid Tales”.  That’s quite an effort.

Thanks to my beloved, this year’s curated Christmas experience has been a conga-line of social engagements.  I suspect this is some refractory response from her to the seemingly-endless series of COVID Christmases that preceded it.  Here in Nanny-alia, those holiday seasons invariably featured dire warnings of doom, lockdowns and draconian curtailment of anything resembling parties.  Saying “Ho Ho Ho” in a public space would have been the epidemiological equivalent of singing (which was banned) and also certainly result in police arrest and enormous Government fines.  Santa had been detained for illegal border crossing, the reindeers slaughtered for bio-security and the elves were all packed away in a wardrobe.

This year we seem to have been ricocheting between concerts, dinners and parties for weeks and sometimes I find myself fondly recalling being told by a Government minister on the television that we weren’t allowed to go anywhere.  Ironically, everybody still seems to have COVID but we’ve gotten used to it.

For the most part, the whole nappy thing is just woven into the general texture of my life now and I don’t think too much about it.

Occasionally, that’s not such a great strategy.

A pre-Christmas dinner party in the city was afoot.  I’d spent most of the day preceding it attempting to stuff large amounts of my garden into a “green waste” wheelie bin.  As you would expect for South East Queensland in December, by the time I was done, my nappy was the driest garment I was wearing.  The temperature and humidity both conspired to product sauna-like conditions amongst the greenery.

I’d showered and changed quite early: about 3pm, largely because my Abena had disintegrated in the heat in typically Scandinavian fashion and my clothes were too wet to wear inside which was where the air conditioner was.

I’d switched to a Rearz “Little Mermaid”.  Partly because I had some, partly because they could handle the likely-14 hour shift until morning (not that I was expecting wet weather, I assumed I was dehydrated) and partly because using a purple-and-green nappy could be gotten away with in contrast with next Saturday where I would be staying away from home with my beloved where she would have nobody else to watch.

We started the evening in a hipster-bar which tragically, although fully embracing hipster pricing and service levels, had not moved beyond fizzy yellow beer on tap.  I solved this problem by drinking lots of it.  It tastes a little better after enough of it.

After that, we moved on to a Tapas bar which is a surprisingly expensive Spanish technology for not quite having dinner.

Somewhere around our 14th course, I was aware that I was wetting quite a bit but things were largely running on autopilot and I had not seriously considered the possibility of nappy failure. A few times I’d been a little surprised by the amount of pee that accompanied these releases but in the way of things these days, there was little I could do about that once flow had commenced. 

I briefly considered trying to stop using my nappy but discounted this for a number of reasons.  Firstly, experience told me that “holding” would work for a limited amount of time but prelude the possibility of a more substantial leak when urgency inevitably defeated desire.

Secondly, I wasn’t sure if I could.

Over the course of the evening, each of our friends (and my beloved of course) had visited the bathroom at least twice.  I was already somewhat self-conscious about the fact that I had curiously not done so.  I couldn’t even manage a fake-bathroom-run because I was with my beloved and frankly, explaining THAT to her later was not on my advent calendar.  Bound by my own ties, I’d remained seated on a Spanish timber bench, peeing myself intermittently. 

A couple of 8.5% Spanish amber-ale-like things later and we all arose to find an uber to take us to our respective beds.  Unsurprisingly, when I stood I realised I was quite wet indeed.  As far as I could (discreetly) tell I was not leaking but my plastic pant leggings felt suspiciously wet. 

Even if I WAS leaking, there was nothing I could really do about it.  My “crash kit” was in my car, parked under my carport, about 10km.  Even if I’d had it, what was I going to do?  Disappear for 10 minutes before reappearing wearing different jeans on a different bum whilst carrying a plastic bag?

Relying on the lateness of the hour and dim Spanish lighting, we decamped and took an uber home.

Mercifully, I was NOT leaking and the uberseat remained unsullied.

At my evening undressing, it became obvious that hard-seating-surface “press out” leaks had again Rearz’d their ugly heads.  The inside gusset of my plastic pants was quite wet with pee although there was loads of dry Mermaid-padding available.  Calculating (correctly as it turned out) that bed would be a different matter, I pulled on some terry-lined plastic pants over my Mermaid and retired for the evening.

I was super-wet by morning but the Mermaid had held.

The thing was though, it was only a number of beers later, out in the company of friends in a crowded pre-Christmas restaurant that I realised how blithely and probably too carelessly  I had taken off for my evening flight without any kind of plan, let alone safety net despite the significantly-greater-than-zero risk of in-flight incidents.

This is the contempt bred from familiarity and I should heed this lesson.

[Little Sherri]

1 hour ago, oznl said:

and sometimes I find myself fondly recalling being told by a Government minister on the television that we weren’t allowed to go anywhere.  Ironically, everybody still seems to have COVID but we’ve gotten used to it.

This is the situation here as well. While our Covid Christmases were anticlimactic, involving euthanizing our usual plans and dropping lots of stuff off on people's porches, only to then chat with them while standing outside in -5 conditions, for 45 minutes, at the same time, the couple of weeks that bought me to sit on the couch,  drinking red wine and watching movies with the kids... they were priceless.  

2 hours ago, oznl said:

This is the contempt bred from familiarity and I should heed this lesson.

I have found myself under similar conditions, time and again, and barely dodged disaster a number of times. I also collided with disaster once, and had to deliberately feign greater inebriation than my blood alcohol level would have justified, via deliberately pouring some of my beer onto my lap, in order to cover up my crime. I was sitting on a vinyl stool in a garage so the innocent were unharmed. 

But something along the lines of your situation occurred only a couple of nights ago; I'd gone out "for a pint", but a couple of my buddies unexpectedly sought rides. I was inadequately nappied for what turned out to be a bit of a session, for a weeknight. I'd switched to water, in deference to not firebombing my Christmas with a pre-holiday DUI, but habit is habit, and I kept up with the liquid intake of my brethren, if not their enjoyment of it. I was dribbling away contentedly, when it occurred to me that I was getting out onto thin ice, in the diaper department. However, my car was parked directly out front, and the washroom was out back... I'd have had to trudge out to the car, trudge back with a "package" of some description, wave at my table, head into the bathroom with the package, and then emerge without it. Or, attempt a James Bond-like sneak around the building, to try and get into my car without anyone seeing it. 

Next time, I'll wear a better diaper, and also possibly seek a ride myself, but, the moral of the story is that I still haven't mastered the art of public diaper changes, and someday, I'll pay a price for that.