Strange days indeed - a 24 x 7 experiment

[Newbee]

2 hours ago, oznl said:

Interesting tips thanks!

Yep.  I remember.  I was doing some work out in the Redland Bay area the last couple of weeks (last of the gig economy stuff)  and drove past that place every day and wondered what you were up to.  One day the world will get back to normal and you’ll be cursing and sweating there again.

I’ve got hydration nailed but it seems no matter how much I drink, I don’t leak so I suspect it’s largely getting sweated into my outerwear.

I’ll probably have a chat to Mr Littles Downunder next time I’m up there and get him to measure me for a onesie although I think I’m kind of holding things with my overhanging collared t-shirts.

3rd day working in shorts and nappies.  For some ineffable reason, it seems to have a very “AB” feeling to it (vs my usual “DL” proclivities).  Perhaps because shoes, socks, shorts and nappies were common attire for me as an infant back in the day, it seems to ring some kind of faint memory bell.  It’s not unpleasant, just a little weird in some respects.  I’m back home now still in my work clothes and day nappy: quite comfortable and disinclined to change too early

I was the same when I got home from work today I was also comfortable and couldn’t be bothered to change. I understand the heat I work in a kitchen in a nursing home so it get very hot.

[WBxx]

On 1/27/2022 at 7:01 AM, oznl said:

The gig economy job is over.  I am now (albeit part time), an employee again as opposed to an “independent contractor”.  Niceties such as leave, sick leave and benefits are back on the table along with a certain predictability for specific (albeit modest) weekly earnings.  Whilst remunerating a tiny fraction of my former salary, things are better.

Congrats 

[oznl]

A week has rolled by and I’m starting to get used to the curiously pleasant-but-infantile sensation of working attired only in in socks, shoes, t-shirt and a thick nappy under short pants.  As far as I’ve noticed, there have been no askance looks, no leaks and I’m definitely cooler and more comfortable.   Sober, business-coloured Gary plastic pants under a black compression pant probably help.  I’m still thinking about the onesie.

An odd moment of disclosure occurred not with work, but on the domestic front this week.

In the “hot” months of my climate’s year, I try to sleep only in my nappy, plastic/terry pants and a t-shirt.  This renders my nightwear choices less-than-visually-subtle upon arising.  My Beloved’s strategy for maintaining her force field of denial in the face of such overwhelming visual evidence has been to decamp the scene.  Thus, every morning she pointedly leaves the bedroom for a period of time during which it is tacitly understood that I will change, shower, dress myself and discreetly dispose of my wet night nappy before descending the stairs appearing normal.

Last Sunday was no different.

A combination of awkward work days and limited laundry windows has seen me confined to disposables for weeks now.  Partly out of boredom and partly out of a desire to moderate the velocity with which I was burning through my BetterDry cache, I’d decided to vary things up a bit and drown a Mermaid the previous night.  Another good reason was that I’d changed into my “night” nappy quite early due to a dinner party and thought the Mermaid might have a better chance of going the extra distance.  You may recall I’d whimsically tried them as “24 hour nappies” a month or so ago.  They hadn’t really done that well but I still had ¾ of a pack laying around. 

I’m especially discreet with the Mermaids as I’d reason to suspect that my Beloved would react VERY badly to anything overtly “AB” in décor.

By morning, in keeping with the Mermaid’s preferred climate, this one was pretty saline-soaked.  Upon my beloved’s departure and confidently alone in our bedroom, I peeled off my terry-lined plastic pants, and establishing that they were dry (the Mermaid had successfully contained the night’s work), waddled back to the bed just in the nappy to get a fresh one from my current, open “in-play” nappy packs stored beneath our bed.  I’m disinclined to remove my used night nappy until I’m about to step into the shower because rather perversely, going about unattired seems to summon up pee-urges from some kind of urological underworld.  I’ve found it’s best to minimise no-nappy time.

I’d retrieved an Abena L4 for the day’s use.  After spreading it open and fluffing it a little on the bed I was just in the process of fitting the booster pad into its crotch when suddenly, quite unexpectedly, the bedroom door burst open with the force of my beloved rushing in to share with me what she felt to be an importantly juicy piece of local news derived from Facebook: her golden chalice of journalism.

There before her was her husband on his knees beside the marital bed in nothing but a drenched “Mermaid” nappy, swollen to the size of a small swan but resplendent in luridly extravagant cartoon patterns, presiding Victor Frankenstein-like over a carefully unfolded Abena L4 nappy with a strategically positioned booster pad and a side-salad of white plastic pants waiting alongside it.

It was the stuff of low cost fetish porn cartoons.

I had absolutely no time to react and nowhere to go. 

She blurted out her news:  the imminent fiscal collapse of a café one of my kids works in resulting in the sudden sending-home of all casual staff.  Frankly, this was news everybody had been expecting for some time.  The unofficial lock-down triggered by the Omicron COVID wave was unsurvivable for a business already on its knees from previous protracted Government restrictions and lockdowns.  It was a miracle it had staggered on for as long as it had.

Perhaps selfishly, my mind immediately re-focused on the closer dilemma: my attire.

All I could think of doing was to “steer into the skid” and so to speak and act as normally as one credibly could when thus encountered.  Making no effort to try to conceal anything around what I was doing or wearing (which let’s face it, would only have served to drag, if it were at all possible, even more attention towards it) I just replied in as normal a voice possible for somebody just sprung wearing a pee-soaked cartoon-pillow whilst getting his next nappy ready. 

“Oh well… it’s not like we hadn’t all seen THAT coming…  There’ll be other shifts elsewhere and she was anticipating this weeks ago”.

“I suppose so” she said, hesitantly, still seemingly oblivious to the situation but then suddenly, as if realising for the first moment the Monty Python scene before her, she abruptly turned and left, pulling the door just-a-tad-too-firmly shut behind herself.  There was nobody else at home but perhaps she was trying to make sure the cat didn’t wander in, presumably necessitating expensive pet therapists to deal with the inevitable post-traumatic stress disorder.

I continued with my nappy change.  It didn’t seem that there was much else I could do. 

Absolutely nothing was said later and I didn’t even notice any venomous looks.  She MUST have seen the waiting Abena spread-eagled on our bed and I guess that’s one thing but it’s hard for me to see how she could possibly have missed the Mermaid?

It possibly helped that I took her out to lunch later that morning: something I was planning to do anyway in the face of a small-but-predictable pay check.

I’m yet to receive a letter from her lawyer.

[BabyJilly_S]

I can imagine it, that moment , the dramatic pause (in film terms I believe its a "beat") then the realisation, awkward silence, exit stage left....

Good to hear about the job though, however paltry is better than the gig economy, that is terrible, somehow people seem to think it is a good thing.

[oznl]

The anatomy of a bedwetting night:

Although only a bedwetter for 18 months or so after a dry spell of 52 years, I’ve already largely lost insight into what’s going on down there after dark.  This ambiguity is probably exacerbated by factors such as “wet” being “normal” for me down there, going to bed wet anyway, habitually peeing in bed during the night and then, unsurprisingly, waking up wet.  For me, most bedwetting events are only indirectly evidenced through wet morning nappies, empty morning bladders and lack of recall of causative events.

I do know that in keeping with the experience of others, my degree of bedwetting does fluctuate over time.  There are plenty of nights where I have clear recall of waking up and using my nappy deliberately one or more times.  Sometimes a “run” of these kind of nights persist where although I’m wet, I can clearly recall doing it deliberately during the night.  Even then, it seems that almost inevitably within a week or so, I will greet the dawn with a soaking nappy I can’t explain.

Last night however, a rare set of circumstances allowed me to observe what happens during a bedwetting night.

I’d been trying to get some cloth nappy time back into my life.  At night, I prefer cloth but my beloved doesn’t.  She says she can smell pee from them.  She also doesn’t like me laundering them but is devastatingly unlikely to launder them herself.  My new job also involves more worked days and less opportunity to manage the laundry.  It’s too hard to deal with wet cloth nappies on a work morning anyway.  On Friday however, I went to bed in pinned, terry nappies.  Saturday I spent in cloth pull-ups and on Saturday evening, I changed into an old “DPF” cloth nappy I had hanging around, just to give it something to do really.  This dubiously-engineered Velcro wonder was never likely to survive from 6pm until 8am the next day so somewhat unusually, I’d resolved to change myself again before bed: a three nappy day.

At around 10:15pm, I took a melatonin tablet (part of my attempts to bring my rampaging insomnia back under some semblance of control), cleaned my teeth before retreating to my study for a 10:30pm nappy change.  I cleaned my teeth first because the running water of the tap can often make me pee a little and I wanted to start the night perfectly dry.

Predictably enough, the “DPF diaper” was soaked and probably not far off leaking.

Thusly, I went to bed perfectly dry in a Babykins cotton pull-up layered over a terry pull-up beneath white plastic pants and a t-shirt.  My intent was NOT to intentionally pee and see if I would instead just wet the bed at some point.  Thanks to the Melatonin, I fell asleep quite quickly.

At 1am I woke to find myself wet already.  In a partially-wet cloth nappy it’s relatively easy to tell.  The wet cloth feels wet against your skin and has a relatively strong tactile contrast with the dry areas of the nappy.  Over time and more use however, the entire cloth nappy becomes equitably damp and the sensation of being wet largely disappears, replaced by a sensation of not-unpleasant clammy heaviness and warmth.  I felt distinctly “half wet”: a quick finger check of my nappy under the front of my plastic pants confirmed the diagnosis: I’d peed myself whilst asleep.

I wasn’t THAT wet and I was laying on my back.  I could feel that it was just the front of my nappy that had been used leaving my hips and bum were dry.  Whilst a part of my brain knows that I do this a lot (possibly every night) now, it’s still a shock when I actually catch myself in the act.

I couldn’t recall any pee dream but I had the vaguest notion that I’d stirred into at least semi-wakefulness because I was peeing.  For the first few confusing seconds of semi-wakefulness, I think I could feel pee coming out still.  I suspect in normal circumstances, I might not have made it all the way to consciousness for this routine kind of event but this time I did because I somehow knew I was wetting a dry nappy and furthermore, this was something I had NOT chosen to do, it was happening automatically.

After a few minutes allowing the realisation that I had indeed just “wet the bed” soak in along with the pee soaking into my nappy, I fell back asleep.  I was quite comfortable and didn’t need to pee at all, that presumably having already been taken care of.

A couple of hours later, round 2 occurred. 

This time I was dreaming.  I’ve noticed that melatonin does seem to provoke more frequent and more vivid dreams.  It wasn’t any kind of “pee dream”, just some random rubbish but at some point during that technicolour, dolby-surround-sound, Looney-Tunes stream of psycho-drivel, I could feel that I was wetting my nappies more.  Again I must have been on my back as a slowly spreading pattern of warmth down there indicated pee flowing back down onto my crotch before draining off to one side.  It is quite a distinctive sensation.   At this point in my journey, there is no shock or surprise to this and so I didn’t consider any kind of intervention (such as waking up) but rather just let it run its course.  Nor did this pee event seem to weave itself into my dream narrative.  It was just something that I was dimly aware was happening whilst I was dreaming.  I don’t think I actually woke up at all for that one at the time.

Later, at around 4am, I WAS woken by our cat, who, having managed to force open our bedroom door, had proceeded to chase geckos around our bed before loudly demanding breakfast.  As I arose to eject the cat, I realised that I was noticeably wetter than I was at 1am (now sporting a wet hip as well as a wet crotch) and that my bladder was again quite empty.  It was then I recalled feeling that I was peeing in my nappies during a dream.

I went back to bed, fell back asleep (again! Oh hale sweet Melatonin) and as far as I know dreamed no more.  I was woken at around 7am, again empty-bladdered, by our next door neighbour’s foul-tempered early-school-aged daughter loudly berating her parents about the quality and diversity of the breakfast menu.  I appeared to be a bit wetter again and I could faintly smell wet nappy.  By now both hips as well as my crotch were wet.  I spent the next 45 minutes or lying in bed trying to ignore the toxic spoilt brat’s screeching, occasionally dripping a little (deliberately) until it was time to get up and make the Sunday morning coffee.

Upon changing, I realised that although well wet, I wasn’t saturated.  The seat of my cloth nappy was still dry.  I suspect that this is evidence of vasopressin at work: most of the pee action happened in the DPF cloth diaper during the 6pm – 10:30pm shift with the 10:30pm until 8am shift in the Babykins, although wet, not AS wet.

This wasn’t quite the same high stakes experiment as I’d conducted six months ago (involving no nappy, a 3am freeze in soaked bedding and a ruined night’s sleep).  This time I was in a securely fitted nappy that I intended to use at some point anyway.  All that was different was that I fell asleep dry and refrained from any deliberate peeing, allowing me to with 100% certainty, identify at least the first bedwetting incident of the evening. 

Still, I learned some things from this night:

• This is the first bedwetting event that successfully observed on the first night I looked for it supporting my suspicion that by now I am bedwetting more frequently than I realise.
• I first wet within 2 – 3 hours of falling asleep (this aligns with my previous “unprotected” sleeping experiment where I was woken by cold, wet bedding just before 3am)
• Assuming I am asleep afterwards, I will experience another wetting event after another 2-3 hours and this cycle can repeat.
• The per-event void volume is low, suggesting that urination is not precipitated by a “full” bladder but rather by some semi-automatic response to a slightly-full bladder
• I am urinating most frequently whilst laying on my back (not the position in which I fell asleep but a patterned behaviour shaped by unreliable disposable nappies)
• The act of urination seems to have a slight rousing effect on sleep that may or may not result in wakefulness towards the end of it but it also may instead interact with dream narrative, appearing within the narrative of even influencing it (the “pee dream”)
• Some pee episodes just happen: no dreams, no insight, just some pee at around 2 -3 hours from the previous episode

Apart from the insight into the chronology of what is now inescapably my adult-onset secondary enuresis (that’s the 10c word for reverting to bedwetting as a grown up apparently), the irrefutable evidence of it at 1am, devoid of any of alternate-but-less-likely rationalisations was still a bit of a head spin.

It’s a strange alloy of worry and excitement that makes for a strange day indeed.

[oznl]

A slightly out-of-synch update, triggered (or perhaps inspired) by @BabyJilly_S's announcement, just a few hours ago, that they have found themselves to have (possibly inadvertently) joined the DD Bedwetter’s Club.

I was at once amused and utterly recognisant of their strange alloy of shock, disbelief, guilt and excitement when, after successfully ignoring all hints, signposts and warnings for months, they were finally confronted with the irrefutable evidence of waking up in a pee-soaked bed they didn’t particularly want and could not recall making.

I wonder if Victor Frankenstein felt something similar when his monster became self-aware, autonomous and recalcitrant before leaving the house in order to terrorise a village.

It really IS something of a mind@#$%

The thing is, according to the collective received wisdom of the 24/7 diapering world, bedwetting is supposed to be the LAST symptom of diaper dependency to emerge, not the FIRST.  .  We should have had loads of time to see the warning signs, change our minds and scuttle back to safety and instead, we’re suddenly washing wet sheets if we’re not careful in applying our nappies at night.   Even the bible of this topic, the “12 month guide” suggests night wetting as something that only appears after day wetting has become established.

Within our cohort, I think @sparklezBear was the first cloud to burst, becoming a bedwetter within mere months of reverting to 24/7.  Next was me.  I spent months in denial about bedwetting evidence.  I only have categorical proof of bedwetting that was established about 2 years after going 24/7 although I suspect that I’d been bedwetting on and off for about a year before that meaning that it took about 12 months to manifest.  @Little Sherri is by now, at least an occasional bedwetter.  @Stroller might be dragging the chain but to be honest, seems to pay so little attention to what’s happening inside his nappy that he mightn’t know for sure anyway.

Bottom line (no pun intended): there is a more-than-zero number of people who I consider to be highly credible sources who are reporting the same experience as me.  They have developed bedwetting whilst maintaining some degree of daytime continence.

I think the manual might be wrong on this one: bedwetting can happen sooner than we think and leaves us with the paradox of how to choose NOT to do something we did not CHOOSE to do in the first place.

[BabyJilly_S]

I have to say that whereas it was not my intention to actually leak and physically wet the bed, I did work to lose overnight control (effectively be a "bedwetter" for want of a better term). I am very much enjoying the nights where I don't wake up until the alarm goes off and my kidneys are thanking me for being better hydrated.

Interestingly speaking to your timings for me currently there does seem to be a point at which I am sleeping deeply enough that the mind (sub-conscious or otherwise) is completely taken out of the equation and mechanically the body takes action itself still. Vis a vis a semi-erection to stop flow at which point I may be woken up to give permission depending how full I am. Sometimes that doesn't happen and I awake with the alarm. Generally there is something to be let out when I  awake. 

So still some ways away from waking up completely empty all the time.

[oznl]

8 hours ago, BabyJilly_S said:

Generally there is something to be let out when I  awake. 

So still some ways away from waking up completely empty all the time.

Usually there is *something* in me on waking, it's just nothing like a bladder-load, there is zero pee urge and in the olden days, I wouldn't have dreamed of trying to void with that little.  I might summon up a couple of seconds dribbling or even a weak stream maybe.  I couldn't tell you of the last time I was aware of a pee urge in bed outside of waking up to discover a "kinked hose".  It seems if the hose isn't kinked, things will often take care of themselves whilst I'm asleep now.

 

[oznl]

My Barry (Rearz Elite Hybrid Whatever-you-call-it) leaked at work on Tuesday which was rather irritating.

It was a very minor leak.  We’d started the work day with a “team building exercise” which to be honest, is the kind of corporate dross I’d rather thought I’d left behind.  It’s also an excellent way of carving a big chunk of productive time out of a working day. 

Determined to resist the inexorable pull of my new employer to have me utilise some of my previous work-life skills to re-engineer chunks of their business (whilst paying me close-to-janitorial amounts for what is supposed to be a menial role), I’d deliberately worn my work shorts (over a nappy of course) and my hi-vis shirt to the cheap suburban motel where my employer had booked a meeting room: a kind of polar opposite to the “dress for success” maxim.

It turns out that my sartorial decision was perfectly aligned to the venue that had been hired.  You know the kind of cheap suburban motel.  The kind that was built in the 1980s, built of 1980s poo-brown brick with fake Spanish arches, the kind that considers having a colour TV in every room as a marketing opportunity, the kind that includes a bleak, concrete swimming pool that contains at least 7% urine by volume and features a honeymoon suite containing a cracked, vomit-pink spa-bath pre-filled with pubic hair.

The coffee was revolting but I drank it anyway.

As the facilitator filled sheets of butcher’s paper with felt-tipped-pen-rendered drivel (why do they call it butcher’s paper when it’s used mainly by corporate training facilitators?), I was filling my Barry.  I don’t know where it all came from.  Maybe it was the cheap hotel coffee I was quaffing (I sincerely doubted that 43 beans had made it to my cup) whilst I was lamenting the complete absence of conference room mints (I mean, what is the POINT of a conference room without free mints?)

It occurred to me half way through yet another disturbingly long-ish but quite comfortable wee in my chair that in 24 hours, my used nappy and all that distilled, felt-tipped corporate wisdom would both be on their way to the same place: land fill.  Hopefully neither of them to ever be seen again.

Anyway, by 11:30am, we were free, I had road work to do, but I was already fairly wet.  I grabbed the van (I’m the only employee that dares to park it) and left, hoping for the best.

By 3pm however, there was a small cool spot on my rear right thigh.  Annoying, but far from catastrophic.  It was sufficiently small for me to have a rummage around in my plastic pants to rearrange things and chance it for the balance of the day.  Fortunately, it wasn’t really enough to be risking any seat contamination, rather a small zone of enhanced humidity on my outerwear.

But it COULD have been.

It did occur to me that for some, this would be their cue to stop wetting their nappy and hold on for a toilet.  For me however, this seemed monumentally difficult so I didn’t bother to try.

When I got home, I weighed the weeping Barry.  With a pee pay load of only around 1.4 litres, I don’t know what all the fuss was about.  It really could, and should have done better.  It was a standard press-out leak on the rear of a thigh towards the crotch.  I sometimes thing that these are exacerbated by plastic pant elastics that can ride up to the wetter areas of the nappy but it’s at best circumstantial evidence.

The next morning I discovered that my waterproof PUL pants smelled distinctly of pee and so they went with me into the shower for the morning rinse and I found a fresh pair for work.

On the Friday I was driving “long haul”: a 500km day out into some remote area.  I squibbed and chucked a Molicare, spare pair of plastic pants and a small rubbish back along with my notebook in a backpack and took it with me.  In strict accordance with Murphy’s law, Barry held up brilliantly and I didn’t need it.  If it didn’t, I guess we are looking at Megamax but I’m already throwing so many dollars per month at nappies…

[oznl]

A very brief update:  Friday night afforded me another opportunity to rearrange my nappy-cadence and go to bed dry in order to see what happened.

Accordingly, I clambered into bed at around 10:45pm wearing a dry, layered Babykins cloth pull-on nappy under encased plastic pants.  Thanks to melatonin, I fell asleep swiftly.

I woke up at 1am in order to feel a small pee begin.  It wasn’t much more than a couple of seconds of weak stream but I remembered with a start that I didn’t “intend” to pee whilst awake.  The moment it had stopped (I pee episodically these days so the void was almost certainly incomplete), I simply chose not to pee any more.  Sleep had clouded my judgement and so I’d failed to see that I had indeed NOT started to pee whilst awake but rather, had been somehow awakened by it.  

Whilst there is a distinct (and rather comfortable) sensation associated with wetting a dry cloth nappy, I doubt that’s what woke me up because I’m fairly sure the pee stream hit the nappy pretty much at the same instant I woke.  If it was a sensation that woke me, it would have been the “I’m peeing” sensation we get that preludes actual micturition by a second or two and this had somehow set off an alarm bell in my head that I did NOT intend to pee whilst awake.

A classic example of quantum indeterminacy as applied to bedwetting.  My sleep-befuddled attempt to manage it, stopped it.  I should have just let it finish of its own accord, such is the comparative wisdom of wakefulness.

This was in contrast to last Friday where I simply woke up to find myself reasonably wet.

A quick check showed that there was only a teacup-sized wet patch at the front of my nappy and I fell back asleep.

At 4am I was woken by pee urges.  I had one of those annoying-and-mystifying nocturnal erections that had me turning my nappy into a justly-famous emulation of a tent and my urethra was consequentially constricted.  This has happened before.  I’d woken because I’d wanted to pee and I couldn’t although I couldn’t remember any pee dream around this (as sometimes happens).

I rearranged myself to point “up” (a luxury available to me in cloth) and more or less instantly, substantially wet my nappy but I would have to describe that as a deliberate void.

I fell back asleep, warm wet and comfortable.  It’s not clear if there were any further sleep-wetting events.

Whilst not as comprehensive a bedwetting event as last Friday, the headline here is that on TWO consecutive Fridays, I rearranged my nappy schedule to go to bed dry in order to reliably test if I was sleep-wetting and on TWO consecutive Fridays, I directly witnessed varying degrees of sleep wetting.

It does make me wonder about the other days of the week…

[WBxx]

2 hours ago, oznl said:

I rearranged myself to point “up” (a luxury available to me in cloth) and more or less instantly, substantially wet my nappy but I would have to describe that as a deliberate void.

Pointing up at night clad in a disposable used to be sure leakage for me.

But with ever decreasing volume per wetting combined with positioning diaper higher in front and folding coversheet back under I’ve discovered I can generally sleep pointing up without leakage.  With this arrangement front padding is often totally soaked when I awake but all is contained.  This is much better, pointing down is perverse.  We were designed to sleep pointing up!

[oznl]

2 hours ago, WBxx said:

Pointing up at night clad in a disposable used to be sure leakage for me.

But with ever decreasing volume per wetting combined with positioning diaper higher in front and folding coversheet back under I’ve discovered I can generally sleep pointing up without leakage.  With this arrangement front padding is often totally soaked when I awake but all is contained.  This is much better, pointing down is perverse.  We were designed to sleep pointing up!

It's definitely more comfortable sleeping pointing up I agree.  Pointing down along with a nocturnal erection results in instant urethral obstruction with resulting discomfort and painful voiding.

Despite massively reduced void volumes (and increased void frequency) though, I still find myself extremely leak prone in any disposable that way.  Pee seems to track along the top of the nappy before running down to my hips and finding its way out.  Pointing down on my side and pee has a chance of getting caught by the leak guard and getting diverted (somewhat) to the seat of the nappy.

Perhaps things will develop in your direction over time.  That would be nice.

For now, cloth is the answer.  I can sleep "up", void on my side, no problems.  It won't get past the director of domestic affairs though.  If it wasn't for her, I'd use cloth every night.

[oznl]

Two minor nappy “firsts” in what was otherwise an uneventful week.

I attended my routine 6 monthly GP consult in a nappy the other morning.  Historically I’ve squibbed and found my ratty, surviving pair of gym underpants for these.  Well into year 3, and leaving departure-preparation to the last minute, I couldn’t locate the surviving gym-underpants (it’s entirely possible that my beloved would have somewhat pragmatically, thrown them out in one of her highly intermittent clean-up crusades).  Soon it would have been the doctor waiting for me rather than the other way around as god and nature intended. 

“Screw it” I thought to myself and simply changed into an Abena L4, booster, Gary PUL waterproofs and black compression pant over the lot: my standard non-work-day attire. There wasn’t much courage involved as I knew it would be VERY unlikely that I would receive any kind of examination.

I was even just a little wet as I went through the consultation. I guess I could have stayed dry if I’d needed to but I didn’t think I needed to and I’d rather be comfortable.  In the (highly unlikely) scenario of being uncovered, I’d decided I’d just have to own it (really, what else could I do?) and get through as best as I could, hopefully avoiding a tsunami of spurious urology work.

As expected however, nothing was said nor apparently noticed (I did monitor eye gaze direction to some extent).  I did get the usual six monthly question about bladder habits to which I replied, somewhat ambiguously “normal”.  In fact I pee in anaemic spurts and dribbles every few minutes during the day and wet myself whilst asleep but for me that is normal so technically it’s true enough.

Thusly, the can of “engaging medical science with my emerging nappy dependency” was again kicked down the road.

Next “routine” will be my annual skin cancer check.  There is zero chance of getting through THAT in a nappy unnoticed.  My plan is to wear underwear with perhaps a safety-pad stuffed into it that I pull out just before the check.  If things have markedly deteriorated in the six months before it, I’ll either wear a pull-up or get some of those dreadful Depends underwear things and just deal with whatever happens.

The other “first” for the week occurred asleep in a chair in front of the television.

I blame society.  Other, more analytical heads may blame the vast quantity of red wine I’d first consumed but they would be blind to the social mores that had seen me spend Saturday night uncharacteristically alcohol free as “designated driver” for my beloved so that she could quaff champagne at scale.  As one of the few non-inebriated people there, it was for me, a fairly joyless party.  It was in consequence to this socially sanctioned sobriety that most likely caused me to indulge in refractory and compensatory drinking on Sunday night to make up for the lost liver exercise.

Anyway, I can’t say the “falling asleep in chair after vat of red wine” thing is really a first because it isn’t.  I do it every few months or so.  It’s better than staggering around the house singing “Joy Division” songs or snacking on a block of tropical fish food from the refrigerator because I thought it was chocolate (for the record, I have done NEITHER of those things whilst intoxicated but I know somebody who HAS).

The process of falling asleep in my chair is fairly formulaic.  Firstly, everybody else goes to bed.  Sometime after that, the voices from the sprites on the television become somehow faint and distant.  The plot of whatever it is I’m pretending to watch drifts away from me like smoke.

Then nothing: generally a deep, dark, dreamless nothing.  For a while until the alcohol starts to wear off.

Waking up is like a form of unexpected time travel.  Suddenly, I’m back in the room.  I’ve no idea what the TV program I find myself sitting in front of is about, no idea what time it is or where all the other family members have gone and various smart-lights around the house have sunk down into their “night light” mode, making the house dark and gloomy.

It was 12:38 am.  What happened to 10:38pm and 11:38pm?

Fortunately my beloved sleeps like she’s been euthanised.  10 minutes after taking to her boudoir, I could enter with a Mariachi band and an enraged polar bear and she’d still ask me “what time did you come to bed?” the next morning.

Thanks to this miracle-slumber, I was able to, well after midnight, drop my shorts and compression pants, pull up a pair of terry-lined waterproofs over my evening BetterDry, find my pyjama-t-shirt, stumble to the ensuite bathroom, frighten a cat and clean my teeth all with requisite room lighting whilst she slept on oblivous.

At this stage of my journey, turning on the tap to clean my teeth invariably, and semi-automatically causes a brief shower in my underwear but not tonight (or technically, not this morning).  I realised then that my bladder was completely empty and my BetterDry was considerably wetter than the handful of brief dribbles across the evening I could recall would give rise to.

It looks like that not only did I fall asleep in my armchair but I managed to wet myself after doing so.

That was the other first.

[oznl]

I think I’ve just come off a plateau that I’ve been on for several months…

People often talk about “plateaus” in one’s journey of adaptation toward permanent nappies: those long periods of time where not much seems to happen and nothing changes, kind of like a nappy-based “Groundhog Day”.   For many, many months since the first fleeting glimpses of bedwetting appeared, I’ve been in a stable phase of “intermittent” bedwetting with perhaps 2 to 3 nights per week featuring unexplained, overnight pee-based incidents. 

It seems however that in the space of a few weeks, or maybe a month, I’ve dropped down a few levels into a “will wet the bed almost every night” kind of guy.

On the plateau of occasional bedwetting upon which I was for so long, bedwetting incidents were fragile and fickle.  Almost any attempt to force or corral them into plain sight would perversely, send them into hiding.  An early experiment last May did in fact see me “wet the bed” (I slept without a nappy and duly soaked the sheets) but it was only on the second night and triggered as much by alcohol and exhaustion from my first nappy-free (and sleepless) night.

Only recently however, I’ve found myself suddenly able to observe these events much more readily by simply going to bed dry and waiting to see what happens.  Two such experiments in the last 10 days resulted in two wet nappies that I could not explain, notwithstanding additional, circumstantial evidence that I wet myself after falling asleep in an armchair.

Once is an event, twice a co-incidence but thrice is a trend.  So on Friday I again juggled my nappy change cadence so that I would be going to bed dry to see what happened.

As an aside, to do this I again pressed an old “DPF cloth diaper with extra padding” into service for the evening shift (in order to go to bed dry, I basically need to use three nappies for the day instead of two).  I’ve always been a bit dubious about that ancient DPF diaper with its less-than-enthusiastically-grippy Velcro and whilst puffy, curiously unabsorbent core.  It was ok last week but last night I realised just before my bedtime nappy change that one of my short leggings was wet: it was leaking.  Changing for bed in the laundry downstairs, I pulled down my plastic pants only to experience a sudden water feature on the floor as half a cup of pee poured out of the crotch of my plastic pants onto the floor.  I actually had to mop up to make sure the laundry didn’t smell of pee in the morning.   I remembered why that old DPF cloth nappy had been relegated to the back of the wardrobe.   “DPF” in this context stands for “Deliver Pee to Floor”.

Anyway, clean and dry in Babykins pull-on cotton nappies, I went to bed.

At 3:38am, I woke up.  This isn’t unusual.  I usually wake briefly a few times every night.  In fact, sleeping through from 11pm through to 3:38am was for me, a very good result.

I checked my nappy:  I was wet.  I was actually quite wet.  Despite being thickly nappied, not only was the front wet, I was wet at both sides and some ways down towards the seat of my nappy.  The quantity of fluid needed to get THIS wet suggested that I had peed in it more than once already.  The fact that it was relatively uniformly damp rather than warm and wet in a specific area suggested that I’d wet it quite some time ago,  probably hours.  I don’t believe it was any act of peeing that woke me up as the evidence suggested I’d been wet for quite a while by the time I woke.

There had been no “pee dreams”, no clue at all as to when this might have happened.  All that had happened was that I’d woken in a wet nappy after falling asleep in a dry one.  I fell back asleep to wake around 7am with a bladder and nappy status suggesting that I’d wet yet again.

Three recent experiments, three empirically provable bedwetting events. 

It seems that my bedwetting is now much more robust and regular.  It no longer disappears if I try to measure or manage it.  The “training wheels” of being wet when I go to bed seem to be no longer necessary and I think that it sneakily became my new normal when I wasn’t watching.

I HAVE to wear nappies at night now (or whenever I might doze) because I will pee in my sleep.  This although slow, was desperately easy to achieve.  I just went to bed in a nappy and used it every night for a few years and here we are: full time, oblivious bedwetting for the first time in 55 years.

My god.  What have I done?

[BabyJilly_S]

4 hours ago, oznl said:

My god.  What have I done?

Perhaps I have jumped the gun on that diagnosis, but that was the feeling mixed up with elation and excitement. Very odd. 

 

[oznl]

It was early Monday morning.  I don’t work Mondays but my beloved does.  She likes to get up very early, usually around 5am.  Plagued by feelings of guilt that she is getting up to work and I am not as well as the constant, rousing clatters and thuds as she noisily goes about her morning ablutions, I cannot sleep easily after 5.  Instead, I marinate on in bed clad only in my t-shirt and my (by now quite wet) night nappy under the ceiling fan drifting in and out of doze.

She tends to flit in and out of the room at this time, alternating between our walk-in-robe, ensuite bathroom and the kitchen downstairs in her pre-office-commute rituals.

In a “downstairs” phase of her AM cycle, I got out of bed myself.  She’d been in the walk-in robe for a curiously long period of time and I wondered what she might have been doing in there.

Upon entering I instantly saw the answer: redecorating.

The floor-standing shelving unit we use to store currently-worn garments overnight under the robe window had been pulled out and to one side.  In its place was the portable clothes drying rack from the laundry.

Hanging from that rack was some kind of garish display constructed from what had to be every pair of plastic pants that I owned.  Like socks, it’s surprising what a large number that becomes over time.  They’d been colour-coordinated: white ones next to the blue ones, yellow ones down on a lower rack.  Usually hidden, they were hung before me in their in-your-face display like some twisted Tibetan prayer-flag arrangement or a string of deflated balloons: limp, hanging waterproof shards reflecting a party that had long ago ended.

I heard my beloved re-enter our room behind me.

“Is THIS what we do now is it?” I asked quietly, not turning to face her but instead continuing to ruefully contemplate her morning’s handiwork.  It wasn’t the décor, the feng-shui or the colour arrangement that was depressing me but the inescapable symbolism behind it.

“I want THEM OUT OF MY LIFE!” she spat, wheeling on the spot to depart the bedroom for her work, the door slam behind her providing a percussive exclamation point to this sudden brain-fart of venom.

At this emotional crescendo, I woke up with a start:  it was just gone 6am and she was in fact, still downstairs clattering in the kitchen. 

It was all a dream (except for the bit about lying under a ceiling fan in nothing more than a t-shirt and my wet night nappy whilst drifting in and out of lucidity).  A startlingly realistic dream.  It’s not uncommon for me to dream vividly and confusedly in the half-sleep of this time.

Welcome to my latest kind of “pee dream”:  a “pee nightmare” really.  There have been a couple of these recently, mostly jumbled.  This one was one I could recall with awful clarity, days later.

My beloved did nothing to provoke this.  That dream was a postcard from my subconscious.  Written in a yellow ink of guilt, reminding me that I’ve made myself into a bedwetter, possibly permanently and if so, she will be permanently forced to share the consequences of my choice and it remains her right to be permanently angry with me.

I suppose things are starting to get a bit real now.

It’s probably not the kind of “24/7” story you want to hear but that’s non-fiction for you.  This is the kind of ambiguous, grey-scaled, contradictory and often far-removed-from-Disneyland-happy-ending stuff that actually happens…

[BabyJilly_S]

Yikes, that was scary. Thought it was real for a moment ?  

[Stroller]

1 hour ago, BabyJilly_S said:

Yikes, that was scary. Thought it was real for a moment ?  

Maybe it was.  Maybe the waking up bit was the dream...

[Little Sherri]

 

On 2/24/2022 at 8:36 AM, BabyJilly_S said:

Yikes, that was scary. Thought it was real for a moment ?  

Wow, that had me at the edge of my seat too! I thought at first, before realizing that the whole thing was played out on a field of theta waves, that her arranging your plastic pants was a peace offering, but that idea was shattered by the venomous utterance.

I'm just getting caught up here - there were a couple of posts I hadn't read. Let's see... yes, if my diaper is off, I tend to suddenly need to pee too. Also, I almost always hiccup something out when I'm brushing my teeth - must be the running water. Lastly, lately, I've been having "premature urgency" - even if it's only been 30 minutes since I emitted anything, I'll get a feeling like I would in the pre-nappy days if it had been several hours. And it's not like I've been deliberately holding it. Strange. Whatever comes out occurs in a great surge that peters off almost immediately, because it only represents a half or three quarters of an hours work for the kidneys, so no biblical floods. 

[oznl]

Thanks to a combination of Putin and COVID, it’s fairly unlikely that you’ve received any reports on Brisbane’s weather lately so let me fix that for you.  Like my underwear these days, it’s warm and wet with widespread flooding. 

To further complicate life, I am (temporarily) full-time in cloth nappies.  Let me explain.

Over the space of 4.5 days we’ve just endured approximately 800mm of rain directly at our house but in suburbs not too far away, falls of up to 1635mm have been recorded in the same time (that’s the thick end of 5 and a half feet for those of you who express distances in multiples of Henry VIII’s thumb length).  Most of the rivers are in major flood and roads are cut everywhere.   My new job is now precarious because although the building itself did not flood, it has been inaccessible by vehicle due to floods since last week.  I’ve managed to do a small amount of work remotely or using equipment I can retrieve from the office on foot across a swamp but I’m uneasily waiting for the “stand down” (without pay) phone call.

To be brutally honest, floods are far from unusual for South East Queensland towards the end of summer (which is something of a rainy season at this latitude).  It’s a sub-tropical (near-tropical) city built on a flood plain although this one is big.  Sadly, properties and lives have again been lost.

Our house is quite high set.  Even in the major floods that hit Brisbane in 2011, we achieved nothing more than a few days without power and internet, a privation somewhat compensated for by our property for the first time since it was built, enjoying a water view (the floods extended to the small valley in front of us).  We’ve had a water view again this week but managed to keep power and internet which is nice.

Based on the weather forecast of the day (a few showers clearing), I’d routinely switched into cloth nappies after work the previous Friday.  These kinds of tropical storm systems are notoriously difficult to track and most models had it drifting off to intensively water a patch of the coral sea.

But it didn’t.  It rained, rained, rained again, often thundering as well: all day, every day.

I soldiered on in cloth.  By Sunday night I had amassed a substantial pile of rinsed-but-pee-flavoured adult sized cloth nappies in the laundry whilst the ceaseless, laundry-preventing rain pelted down with an intensity that would have many considering ark construction with or without divine imperative.  We have a tumble dryer but in monsoonal heat and humidity, it doesn’t work that well and you don’t win any family friends by running it.  I pinned myself into another 60” x 60” kite-folded terry square and went to bed for another night of dreamless bedwetting.

The rain stopped on Monday but the floods of course did not.  All work was suspended, buses and trains cancelled, the normally busy arterial road a few streets from our house was cut in both directions by floodwaters and silent.  My beloved (who could not get to work) and I (not rostered on for work) strolled down to look at our new shoreline and watch children frolic and ride their boogie boards through dark brown waters filled with sewage and dead animals.

Heading back home for breakfast, I changed out of the (by now very wet) terry night nappy into an Abena L4 disposable, taking the rinsed-but-far-from-pristine garment and plastic pants down to add to Mount Pee-pee in the laundry.  As I walked past my beloved en route to the laundry she glared and made a series of steam-train noises.

“Can I use the washing machine?  There’s stuff in it already.”

“Yes” she spat…  “Just go and wash your nappies NOW.  It STINKS in there”.

I’d forced her to use the “N” word.  Normally they are just “things” in her vernacular, a kind of perverse micro-victory.

I tried to explain that the nappy situation had metaphorically and physically piled up only because of the extraordinary weather rather than my negligence but she would have none of it.  It was not a topic for discussion.  I COULD smell pee in the laundry albeit not strongly and frankly, I had some doubts about its source.  I duly ran the load using an alkali-enhancer to potentiate the soap and an anti-bacterial additive but the laundry still smelled.

It was the cat.  Geriatric and carefree, she’d (yet again) backed her arse over the edge of her litter tray and let rip over the tiled floor.  This excuse melted no ice at all with my beloved so I let her mop it up to drive my point home.

It was then I realised that our garbage had not been collected.  This wasn’t surprising.  The waste transfer station is inaccessible due to floodwaters.

The knock-on problem here is that our “wheelie bin” (garbage can) is these days 50% by volume and 80% by weight comprised of my used nappies and is invariably full by collection day.   It has now been out in the street in front of us, brewing up in the intense, humid Queensland monsoonal heat for three days now.  I’m actually scared to open it.  It may at some point evolve self-awareness.

Our local Government has blithely announced that it intends to simply “skip” this week’s garbage collection and try again next week.  Although my used nappy crisis might be fairly unique, even it probably pales into significance for the large number of citizen’s whose bins are filled with the rotting contents of their refrigerators and freezers: tens of thousands of homes have been without power since the weekend.

I uneasily contemplated the half-a-nappy-bin load in my study sitting in an already-damp Abena that had nowhere to be disposed of. 

I changed back into cloth. 

I can’t keep building a pile of bio-waste that I can’t dispose of and it’s not like I can just stop using nappies at this point.  My cruise range during the day is impractical and I’m dimly aware that I’m currently bedwetting every night (although this might be because “flood rules” are a lot like “COVID lockdown rules” whereby “alcohol free” nights go out the window). 

I’m going to try to stay in cloth for the rest of the week and if my beloved arcs up over it, I’ll have to simply explain to her yet again about available rubbish bin space and why NOT wearing a nappy wouldn’t work out so well for either of us these days.

[Stroller]

Sounds pretty grim down there oznl - hope it doesn't last too long.  We've not had such seroius floods this winter - last year our flood plain filled up enough to start invading our garage & swamp the septic tank.

Anyway, at least it means you're in nice cloth nappies now! Hope they can empty your bin next week though.  Good luck.

[BabyJilly_S]

Can only echo Stroller and wish you the best, 5 feet of water blows my mind to be honest

When I read about the weird weather events going on around the world I am extremely grateful that I live in temperate old England...

[oznl]

To @BabyJilly_S,s point about being frustrated by a slow and erratic transition to bedwetting.

I had a “dry” night last night.  I wasn’t really dry but nor (to my knowledge) did I wet in my sleep.

I went to bed dry at around 11pm.  I woke up at 1am to find myself STILL dry.  When I relaxed, I wet myself a bit.

I woke up at 3am and wet myself some more.

I may have wet some in my sleep at some point but the fact stands that the initial wetting occurred of my own volition because I was awake. 

I really thought I was bedwetting full time by now.  It’s odd that despite my qualms, I should find the experience of NOT wetting the bed to be vaguely disappointing.

[spark]

3 hours ago, oznl said:

To @BabyJilly_S,s point about being frustrated by a slow and erratic transition to bedwetting.

I had a “dry” night last night.  I wasn’t really dry but nor (to my knowledge) did I wet in my sleep.

I went to bed dry at around 11pm.  I woke up at 1am to find myself STILL dry.  When I relaxed, I wet myself a bit.

I woke up at 3am and wet myself some more.

I may have wet some in my sleep at some point but the fact stands that the initial wetting occurred of my own volition because I was awake. 

I really thought I was bedwetting full time by now.  It’s odd that despite my qualms, I should find the experience of NOT wetting the bed to be vaguely disappointing.

Does that happen less often?  For me that it still the norm.  In most cases I still awake when I pee, and I don't feel the diaper is wet when I go. 

The thing is that  I typically change into a diaper right before I turn out the lights, which is around 11pm.   On weekdays, I wake up at 6:15.  By that time I've probably wet at least once knowingly, but diaper is clearly wet.  Not soaked, but definitely leading towards a change.  I typically keep it while I fix coffee, make lunch, and eat breakfast.  I leak a few times, and by then I need a change.  But I think I might be wetting unknowingly at night, because it's wetter than I would expect.

[BabyJilly_S]

I think there is likely some connection between sleep state and permission requests. Not sure if there is anything you can do about it though. Mechanically something just kicks in brain be damned.

I guess its just keep going and as you have proven, things do change with time.....I am 18 months in now and do wet but can clearly remember having to get out of bed and stand up to go early in my 24/7 journey.

Its just the same as anything, as you are in the middle of it the change seems slow.