Strange days indeed - a 24 x 7 experiment

[oznl]

I woke up in the wee hours of Tuesday to a curious sensation.   I was laying on my side in bed (which wasn’t really that much of a curious sensation) but the “curious sensation” thing was that my beloved was holding me tightly from behind in the classic “spooning” position.

That’s something that had all but stopped happening since I went full time back into nappies, or since she hit menopause, or the world went pandemic-mad.  It could be any or all of these reasons but the bottom line is that I don’t get cuddles in bed. 

She does hate the whole “wet nappy” thing and I was acutely aware that I was wet because she was wedged up so tightly against me that I could feel the wet seat of my BetterDry being pushed against my bum underneath its confines of plastic-and-terry Babykins lined waterproof pants.

If this spooning wasn’t enough, her left arm was draped over my side with her hand resting gently but unmistakably against the front of my pyjama pants.  She must have known at some level that she was effectively groping my wet night nappy.  The padding was pretty thick down there.

I basked in the comfortable glow of this affection anyway.  Now more awake, I even peed a little more, wondering vaguely if she could feel anything of that minor event back through her fingertips.

Thusly I drifted back off to sleep.

All too soon, the clock radio went off.

She was still there.  Her body was still firmly against my nappies although her arm had tragically retreated elsewhere.  It was still kind of nice but I felt some kind disturbing undercurrent sensation that, like ants at a picnic, heralded the ruination of an otherwise-pleasurable time.

I felt very high humidity in the bedding and pyjamas between us.

I’ve already had the dubious pleasure of actually wetting a bed with my beloved in it.  Actually wetting my beloved in the process of wetting the marital bed would be next level and not in a good way.

Panicking as quietly as I could, I tried, as subtly as I could, to probe around my hips, bum and crotch with my fingers to survey the magnitude of my tragedy.  Puzzlingly however, I could find no definitive nappy-related source for apparent moisture between us.

Had SHE wet the bed?  And why hadn’t she arisen at the alarm?  She always wants the bathroom first.

I arose and in doing so, confirmed that my nappy had not leaked and that the moisture at my back was indeed from elsewhere.

Turning on a bedroom light in the winter-dawn-gloom, I turned back to face her, relieved to see that she had at last also woken.  It was then that I noticed that her hair was plastered to her, wet with sweat.

“Good morning!  Are you ok there?”

“I was so cold!” she replied weakly.  “I’ve been freezing cold all night.  I just couldn’t get warm.”

My fantasies about acceptance and cuddles winked out like fairies do when people stop believing in them.  This wasn’t romance.  This was thermal mass. I guess the front of my nappy was probably the warmest part of my garb and that explains that as well.

“Now I just can’t cool down” she sighed, her face flushed and small beads of sweat clearly visible on her clammy forehead as she steamed gently into the bedding.

That was why things felt damp by 6am.  There was no pee in the bedding.  That was the good news.

She returned a positive rapid antigen test for COVID later that morning and has spent the subsequent two days coughing and spluttering enthusiastically around me whilst simultaneously interpreting any attempt I make at distancing from her as evidence to my unfaithfulness.

So now we’ll see how good my immune system and all those jabs really are…

[tuffy]

I'm sorry the plague has invaded your household.

Under similar circumstances, I lasted about a week before I came down with it. My wife and I both wore masks around the house and she insisted on sleeping on the couch in the basement (I'm to tall to fit and she isn't). I think what did me in was I started to become lax in my mask wearing.

Here's to hoping you fare better than I did. 👍

[oznl]

That was a pretty weird nappy dream…

Maybe I’m catching COVID.    It’s hard to see how I couldn’t be.  I’m currently living in close quarters with a sputtering, sneezing, snoring and snot-based human-shaped bag of virus who firmly believes that any attempt I make at infection control through distancing is simply naked hostility on my part.  The COVID snoring is so bad I’m somewhat surprised I reached the REM sleep stage to even enable dreaming.

It had been a VERY wet night which of itself is a yellow flag.  I often find myself peeing a lot at night when I’m “coming down with something”.  Somewhat presciently, I’d donned my most capacious night nappy: a folded-and-pinned 60” x 60” terry towel.

I then proceeded to do a very good job in completely drenching it.  I’m surprised and slightly impressed I didn’t leak.  At least some of those wettings were wakeful ones but it’s impossible to know if they all were.  It’s very blurred these days.

Anyway, the dream.

I was in a small room that appeared to be a canvas annexe to a caravan that had somehow mysteriously become my home (let’s hope THAT is not prescient).  I was at the “front” of this room/annex/tent, surrounded by a small group of vaguely-familiar-but-unidentifiable people.  I appeared to be the star of some kind of familial intervention.  It felt like I was playing the star role in one of my trash-TV guilty pleasures; “Hoarders”.

I somehow knew I was in nappies during this event (which of course in waking world I was) but I had no specific recall if I actually used those nappies during the dream.

The nature of this intervention was that people were sorting through my seemingly endless cache of partially-consumed bags of nappies, bringing them before me to request my consent to let them go in an effort to cull the collection.  None of them were what I’d call “good” nappies: they were all the thin, grim, medical variety.

Despite their sub-optimal construction, I had mixed feelings about letting them go.  They weren’t the kind of nappies that were reliable for me or ones I even particularly enjoyed but they WERE folded neatly and pristine inside their albeit-opened packs.  Within the constraints of what they were, they were perfectly functional.

Nevertheless, in the interests of Marie Condo style simplicity, I was saying good bye to them at a reasonable clip.

Then, if it is at all possible, things got weirder.

Standing behind during all of this me was some kind of looping slide show on a screen.  Each of these slides seemed to consist of (apparently, I don’t really remember) pruriently lurid bullet points describing key milestones during my toddlerhood toilet training.

So, any therapist reading: feel free to send me your wildest explanations for this truly bizarre nocturnal narrative care of “Exactly WTF is going on between Oznl’s ears?”.

[Little Sherri]

On 7/13/2023 at 8:26 AM, oznl said:

but the “curious sensation” thing was that my beloved was holding me tightly from behind in the classic “spooning” position.

This is an experience that I suspect wearing nappies all the time has largely precluded. My wife was never really a nighttime snuggler - she runs hot and is prone to nocturnal karate fights with the blankets and/or anyone close by. In the winter, she's been known to get up and throw the window wide open, when it's -20 C outside. In the summer, she sets the A/C to "can see my breath" at night. She often builds herself a personal burrito that she can adjust, eject or ventilate at will. So, I have my own duvet burrito on my side of the bed, which is not a bad thing, since diapers do sometimes leak. I've been remarkably fortunate in that department, considering I'm wearing disposables 98% of the time, with plastic pants only sometimes. My kidneys seem to like to take the graveyard shift off. But I do get spots in the duvet from time to time, usually small spills that don't impact the sheets. However, I have no idea how she'd react if I were pressed up close to her and she came into contact with dampness. It never went well when one of our kids was responsible for it. So I've tended to just enjoy dominion on my side of the bed, and not try to expand my borders. 

What a fascinating dream. Your mind works in mysterious and entertaining ways, sir. Thanks for sharing, and I hope you and your beloved feel better soon! 

[oznl]

7 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

What a fascinating dream. Your mind works in mysterious and entertaining ways, sir. Thanks for sharing, and I hope you and your beloved feel better soon! 

She is well on the mend.  Thanks to all those jabs, it was nothing more than a bad cold although she remains a bit fatigued.

As for me, I never got it!  It somehow "bounced off" me yet again.  I can't figure it out.  I was literally bathing in her droplet exhalations.  I remain stubbornly a "No-vid"...

[oznl]

I had a bit of an awkward moment at work this week that’s left me wondering if two of my colleagues on the clinical side of the business may now have an inkling to my slightly unusual underwear.   It’s all because I was trying to help.   Never do that.

It was nearly the end of my working day when a pair of our occupational therapists wandered over to my desk.  They’d found some ghastly “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up” portable electric hoist rescue contraption from some dim corner of the warehouse and wanted to test it.  On me.  Because (apparently) I was the same height and build (polar bear) as the victim they had in mind for it.

I wasn’t very keen on this (I was tired, I’d been lugging equipment around all day and it was my home time) but they put on their sad faces so I caved in and agreed to help, bringing about the instant restoration of delight.  It’s nice to make people happy.

All I had to do was to lay on the floor as though I’d fallen and they’d take it from there.  How hard could that be?

So I laid down flat on my back on a concrete floor.  Immediately, the not-insubstantial weight of my organs tried to push my quite-curved spine in the small of my back flat and so my good Samaritan effort transformed into a white hot blast of pain.  OTs are trained to recognise pain.  They saw instantly that I was hurting but sadly that was the extent of their training.  They giggled and told me that our physio had already gone home so I’d just have to deal with it and they’d have me upright in a jiffy anyway.  Either “empathy” is reserved for their actual patients or it’s a post graduate qualification they didn’t have.

Laying there, waiting for the pain in the small of my back to subside (it didn’t), they began to haul various aluminium beams, Velcro straps and random plastic interconnect pieces out of the nylon carry bag their new toy came in, positioning various parts it around my now-supine body like a kind of future-scaffold.

It was at this point that inconveniently remembered that I wear nappies and furthermore, the one I was in right now was a very, VERY wet one.   It was the end of my working day and I tend to extract every ounce from the relatively-expensive super-nappies that I use.  Even by end-of-day standards, this one had seen a lot of action and I was suddenly acutely aware of its bulk, weight and clammy warmth.

An aggravating concern for me was the question of personal space.  My nappies are on me all the time, everywhere.  I try very hard (and mostly succeed) in keeping this embarrassing fact a secret.  Maintaining personal space in the company of those not “in the know” is an important foundational stone upon which my castle of discretion rests.

Before I could process all of the embarrassing ways this foolishly extravagant offer of assistance could go wrong for me, an OT passed a nylon safety belt directly across my suspiciously-thick-and-featureless crotch bringing it to rest gently against the front of my nappy.

Personal space isn’t a thing with fall recovery I guess.  I think her hand brushed my hips where at least the padding was minimal.

The other OT raised my knees up off the floor before sliding what could roughly be described as a narrow aluminium bar disguised as a swing seat beneath my now-slightly-knee-elevated thighs before firmly shoving it up against my bum on the floor.

My puffy, well-nappied bum to be precise.  Let’s face it, it’s the only bum I have.

I felt that nappy squish under my jeans.

Unflinchingly, she clipped it to more aluminium bits.  Further supports were placed under my shoulders and also connected to other bits of this doubtlessly-expensive Danish medical torture rack.

After surveying me laying on the office floor with silly grins (enjoying themselves far too much), one of them cheerfully asked “Are you ready to stand up?”

“No, I’ll just lie here and check out the ceiling tiles” I replied.

Sensing sarcasm, she went head and pushed the “beam him up Scotty” button.

I heard a range of mechanical actuator and clicking noises through an arrangement of cantilevered engineering I couldn’t see (because I was laying on my back) as a kind of reverse-scissor mechanism began to close, forcing me to be lifted.

 It turned out that the aluminium bar wedged against my bum was the “lift” point.

Despite advertisements suggesting otherwise, there are solid reasons why the nappy-clad amongst us might be wary about riding bicycles, using t-bar ski lifts or, being winched upright by bum-compressing and diaper-bifurcating aluminium bars.

I felt more squishing.  MUCH more squishing.  Things were seeping out.  I could feel it.

Upright, the OTs were pleased that their contraption had worked.  I however, could feel tell-tale cools spots at the rear of my thighs and even worse, a quick glance at the black plastic cover over the “seat” part of the aluminium lift bar revealed to my practiced eye, some admittedly small but still noticeable moisture marks.

FFS…  At least I was wearing black jeans.  There were zero visual cues there.

In what I hope was ignorance instead of professional courtesy, the therapists gave absolutely no hint that they’d noticed anything.   I saw nothing resembling meaningful glances being exchanged.  To be honest, they weren’t even paying that much attention to me but rather devoting all of it to how well their new toy had worked in transforming me from the horizontal to the vertical plane.  It IS entirely possible that they noticed nothing.   I was after all, NOT their patient, just a dummy load.

On the other hand, they are very used to dealing with nappy-clad people and could presumably know the subtle visual cues that reveal them.

At least I was upright.  I walked back over to my desk and logged off my computer from a standing position.  Grabbing keys, I then left for home immediately.  In my car, I sat upon the small towel baby nappy I’d thoughtfully left in my car glove box for just such occasions.  The press-out leaks were moderate, bordering on prolific…

An autopsy at home revealed that Barry the day-diaper had copped serious fire from the previous evening’s drinking session anyway: nearly two litre’s worth.  It would have needed to have been handled carefully under any circumstances.  Getting used as a cushion in a personal hoist was just pushing things too far…

[oznl]

‘tis the season for nappy dreams.

Last night I dreamt that I’d chosen to wet my pants.  In this dream, I was standing in a room somewhere, a bedroom, fully clothed in dark shirt, jeans and for reasons that only make sense when one is asleep, a “Harry Potter” style black cape.  I didn’t really need to pee but I became aware that there was pee available if I wanted to dump it.  Somehow I knew in my dream that I wasn’t wearing a nappy (which for me would be very strange these days) but that didn’t really matter.  It would be ok.

I relaxed the necessary controls and was duly rewarded with a gentle burst of heat and closeness spreading from the relevant zone.

In real life, wetting my pants is only comfortable for the first second or two.  The brutal reality of a real-life jeans wetting is that after a second or two of warm wet crotch, you have not-quite-as-warm wet legs.  This is rapidly followed by cool-wet socks & shoes, a cold puddle beneath you and then, swiftly, evaporative cooling on the formerly warmer bits.  Very quickly one is left cold, wet and with laundry and a mess to clean up.

This didn’t seem to be happening here though.  The warmth and wetness remained tightly confined and preserved within my underwear.

I drifted into wakefulness to realise that I was actually in bed peeing gently but it was fine.  I was totally dressed for this eventuality:  pinned in terry nappies and plastic pants under my pyjamas.  The early days of “shock” followed by a reflexive “stop!” are long gone.  I did nothing but lie there and let it continue.  Reassured that all was well, I swiftly sank back into sleep.  I can’t even remember if I “finished” awake, I may well have fallen back asleep still in some post-void dribble phase.  It was a pretty slow kind of pee anyway which I’ve noticed my bedwettings usually are, largely devoid of the bladder spasms that accompany daytime wetting incidents.

It was just another bedwetting incident, and, a particularly comfortable one as I’d woken enough to savour the moment.

The unusual thing about this which made it worth of chronicling is that in contrast to most bedwetting incidents I can remember, I’d drunk no alcohol at all the previous evening.  Nor was I particularly tired or hyper-hydrated.  I’d just gone to bed in my nappy and peed it during my sleep.

Another example of the inexorable progression of this new habit.

[Little Sherri]

On 7/20/2023 at 8:35 AM, oznl said:

Maintaining personal space in the company of those not “in the know” is an important foundational stone upon which my castle of discretion rests.

Very well said, and this is the crux of the difficulty I am having in returning to teaching martial arts classes at the gym. I've taught classes while wearing a diaper and a onesie under my gi, and it's fine, as long as I can direct operations or demonstrate techniques on others, without having them demonstrated upon me. But in the more advanced classes, I am expected to be as willing to take a blow or a fall or a throw as I am will to dispense them, and alarm bells start going off if someone delivers an inadvertent kick to my ample behind with their bare foot... did they detect anything? Or, when I'm pinned to the mat, or pinning someone to the mat, and my posterior is "in the shot" as 20 people crane to see what I'm doing or what is being done to me... is their any weird lumpiness to my silhouette? 

[Babygeebee]

@Little Sherri Cool. Sorry to be off topic, but what style do practice?

[Little Sherri]

On 7/22/2023 at 12:45 PM, Babygeebee said:

Cool. Sorry to be off topic, but what style do practice?

It's an MMA program, but predominantly Jiu-Jitsu. 

[Babygeebee]

2 minutes ago, Little Sherri said:

It's an MMA program, but predominantly Jiu-Jitsu. 

I can see where wearing would be a concern. I practice karate, but have yet to wear at the dojo. 

[Little Sherri]

2 minutes ago, Babygeebee said:

but have yet to wear at the dojo. 

I've been experimenting with wearing diapers to the dojo for almost 4 years now, everything from Depends and Goodnites pull-ups to thin, cloth-backed disposables. I've worn the occasional plastic diaper, but only if I'm there in jeans and don't plan to go on the mat. There are two areas of concern, in terms of performance; first of all, I want the diaper to be thin and quiet, but it's also important that it not chafe during the warmup workout, which can be quite intense. 

[Babygeebee]

We have similar intense workouts and sounds emminating from me are a concern. In addition karate gis tend to be lighter as we do not grapple as you do. For kumite (sparing) we wear lightweight breathable gis that are partially see through. I wouldn't want any pattern being decernable that might raise an eyebrow or two. 

[oznl]

It’s been increasingly tiresome to have wet spots on the seat of my jeans EVERY Saturday and Sunday lately:  you’re welcome Abena L4 + boosters, my weekend day-nappy. 

The Abena L4 is (in my humble opinion), a nappy that could be have been great but instead wound up stuck at mediocre courtesy of two critical poor design material choices .

The nappy core is very good, very nearly great.  It’s comfortable both dry and wet and although not capable of Rearz-class feats of absorption, punches above its way, doing a commendable job of deploying all available polymer by wicking well. 

The first let down is its, even-by-breathable-cloth-backed-disposable-dismal standards, hopelessly stretchy/saggy outer “cloth” layer.  It doesn’t stretch.  It expands like a tent unfolding.  And even if it doesn’t expand enough to simply slide down your thighs (and it probably WILL), that thin, stretchy cover also transmits humidity in very short order.

The second design disaster is the tapes.  I guess gorilla-strength tapes would swiftly overwhelm the thin, stretchy pseudo-cloth backing but the ones they did use are so weak they work only in the Tinkerbell-like imaginations of Abena marketeers.

After a short time peeing in an Abena, the only question in my mind is whether it’s heading for my ankles because it’s expanded to twice its original girth or because one or more of its tapes have let go.

Putting aside their propensity to escape out the back door, why the leaking?

I’d wondered if they were actually somehow getting worse in absorbency (perhaps, as they age, I’ve had them a while, they are experiencing degrading polymer or even a minor amount of moisture-ingression compromising initial capacity).  I just don’t seem to remember finishing every Saturday and Sunday with damp spots on the seat of my jeans, double-checking furniture to make sure I wasn’t leaving incriminating soggy patches behind.

In any case, I decided that since whining about them did nothing practical, I’d try a little bit of root cause analysis.

Thusly I carefully inspected my removed-and-damp nappy and clothing gear looking for clues.

Typical of nappy leaks in my experience, the worst of the unwanted seepage APPEARED at the seat of my pants around the thigh elastics of my plastic pants but appearances can be deceiving.  That location is just where gravity and denim intersect.

Careful analysis showed that the inner leg elastics on my Gary PUL waterproof pants were substantially wet at change time.  This to the point where wicking was occurring to around the corner.  I was leaking from between my legs, not at my bum.

The reason that the inner leg elastics were wet is that the crotch of the GARY PUL pants I’ve been using with these is relatively narrow.  Consequentially, those elastics were riding up deep inside my thighs, meeting sagging Abena L4, rubbing against droop-exposed inner nappy wet lining allowing the osmosis fairies to do their thing.

I decided to try some older-school plastic pants with a much wider crotch.

Rummaging in the far reaches of what was formerly my underwear drawer (now it hosts plastic pants and shapewear), I found an ancient pair of white opaque “kins” plastic pants. 

They hadn’t seen service for many years.  The problem with them is that despite their generously-proportioned, cloth-nappy-friendly crotch, bum and high waist,  their comfortable lycra waist elastics made them a bit hopeless worn against wet cloth.   The lycra got wet as well, speedily transmitting moisture to my jeans at the belt line. 

They could however work well given the problem at hand.  Even given that it’s an Abena, the “waterproof” cloth-like lining is at best slightly damp so lycra wicking would most likely not be a thing.

This experiment proved highly successful.

The Abena was still reasonably uncomfortable by end-of-shift, having become sufficiently loose to be flopping around in plastic pants like a body-temperature dead salmon but I did not leak.  There’s been some minor seepage into the plastic pants but that seepage had stayed there.

It’s a shame that it’s a bit like wearing a Turkish bath.  I’m not sure this is viable warm-weather gear to be wearing but at least I can utilise the solid 3 cases of Abena I still have left.

[Little Sherri]

I've never had my hands on more than one or two pro-grade Abena products. I *think* I might have had an L4 in a sample pack I got once - I vaguely recall not being very impressed with the tabs, either. Some people on this site rave about Abena products, however, a phenomenon I've also witnessed regarding Tena, which is a bad word here in Canada. Apparently they have some great products, but you have to own a nursing home to access them. The ones they sell in stores would be best used as bar wipes, or maybe to dry your car after washing. 

[WBxx]

It depends on the coversheet.  Once tried cloth backed … not so good.  But for me plastic backed M4/L4’s are the sweet spot of price vs functionality.  Have several cases tucked away in the basement.  Worn one every night for years without a single tape failure.  I'm a satisfied customer.

 

[PuraVidaDip]

Try the Gary PUL pants. I wear those when wearing casual wear. I use Northshores when at work and sleeping. Totally game changer. I leak probably 25% of the time, and hard to tell when so that helps. My body type must be odd because the larger diapers sag too much and the smaller ones have leakage around the top. Usually due to my penis' direction.

[oznl]

7 hours ago, Little Sherri said:

I've never had my hands on more than one or two pro-grade Abena products. I *think* I might have had an L4 in a sample pack I got once - I vaguely recall not being very impressed with the tabs, either. Some people on this site rave about Abena products, however, a phenomenon I've also witnessed regarding Tena, which is a bad word here in Canada.

It's been said in this place before that the Tena products sold in Asia Pacific are far, far lamer than the European ones.  I voted Tena off my 24/7 island within a month of going back into nappies.  The Abena tapes (which seem to be at least a Commonwealth-wide problem since Canada has the same issue) however are so bad they are a bit infuriating.  They MUST know.

5 hours ago, WBxx said:

It depends on the coversheet.  Once tried cloth backed … not so good.  But for me plastic backed M4/L4’s are the sweet spot of price vs functionality. 

In a heartbeat I would try plastic-backed L4, IF they were available in the much smaller Australian market (which they are not).  The only Abena L4 sold here is that crippled cloth one.  I've never seen plastic-backed ones for sale down here but I will look again.  I suspect they might be a much different animal.

5 hours ago, PuraVidaDip said:

Try the Gary PUL pants. I wear those when wearing casual wear.

Interesting.  It was a "large" size pair of Gary PUL pants that were doing the "go visit the inside of that nappy and see what you can get out" trick.  The problem appears to be the crotch width.  I could probably just go from a large to an XL and see if that does the trick but the Babykins plastic pants do have a significantly wider crotch for a given size, engineered as they are for cloth nappies I guess.

[PuraVidaDip]

16 hours ago, oznl said:

It's been said in this place before that the Tena products sold in Asia Pacific are far, far lamer than the European ones.  I voted Tena off my 24/7 island within a month of going back into nappies.  The Abena tapes (which seem to be at least a Commonwealth-wide problem since Canada has the same issue) however are so bad they are a bit infuriating.  They MUST know.

In a heartbeat I would try plastic-backed L4, IF they were available in the much smaller Australian market (which they are not).  The only Abena L4 sold here is that crippled cloth one.  I've never seen plastic-backed ones for sale down here but I will look again.  I suspect they might be a much different animal.

Interesting.  It was a "large" size pair of Gary PUL pants that were doing the "go visit the inside of that nappy and see what you can get out" trick.  The problem appears to be the crotch width.  I could probably just go from a large to an XL and see if that does the trick but the Babykins plastic pants do have a significantly wider crotch for a given size, engineered as they are for cloth nappies I guess.

I'm 105 kgs and wear a medium Gary pant. The crotch is a bit small, but they seem to work well for me with my Rearz Hybrids. I wear them cloth side out.

I wear a medium in the North Shore pant, shiny side out, to work, but I wear a white onesie, so the shiny side never shows.

I wear a large North Shore Pant to bed.

The plastic pants are just too loud, hot and uncomfortable for me. I leak alot so I have to wear something over my diapers.

Just my $0.02. I will say my wife doesn't love washing them 😅

[oznl]

Because I don’t live in my own private ABDL fantasy, my diapered life is a patchwork quilt of compromises, shortcomings and outright sub-optimal scenarios.  Many (but not all) of these derive from navigating around my beloved who regards my strange predilection with what is at its best, the kind of wariness one might regard a snake inhabiting a garden one wishes to traverse.  At worst, it is closest to outright hostility but admittedly, there hasn’t been so much “at worst” lately.

One of my mitigating strategies is to bend over backwards hiding things to ensure that she is able to pretend I don’t wear nappies.

I have a library of subterfuges and inefficient nappy maintenance workflows designed to obscure the elemental facts and tasks that would otherwise advertise their presence to her.

Wet cloth nappies move towards the laundry in stealthy stages to avoid her seeing them in a kind of domestic “red light / green light” game, oft-times triggering malodorous layovers in my study.  Plastic pants oft are dried in my study cupboard, which, thanks to an adjacent west-facing external wall and the curiously 1980s Australian house construction habit of eschewing insulation, often adopts kiln-like temperatures anyway.  In summer I could probably autoclave in there.

I’ve developed contortionist-like abilities to change clothing in the same room as her without exposing her to the horror of my puffy plastic pants and what may lurk beneath them by exploiting parallax, shadows and ambient furniture.

The never-ending conga-line of fresh disposable nappies is replenished invisibly and never whilst she is home.

My first line of defence however is sartorial camouflage.

Historically, lapses in any of these controls have incurred swift, sharp retribution for justice delayed is justice denied.  I’m well used to having my locational feaux-pas corrected with on-display nappy infrastructure moved or buried or a tart comment about the altitude of my belt line.  The odd piece of kit left laying about has simply gone completely missing; I suspect hurled into a bin.

It is a mystery therefore why this weekend my beloved helped me clear old furniture and other assorted rubbish for our annual “kerb-side cleanup” service for almost half a day, dragging the flotsam and jetsam of Western consumerism down our steep driveway, out into the street to become landfill whilst I had  at least a 1” swathe of milky-opaque Babykins plastic pants over a suspiciously-humid-looking nappy proudly on display over the top of the rear of my jeans.

My concealing shape-wear pants had abandoned their post, my jeans had dropped and the constant bending to shift loads had my t-shirt well north of the Mason-Dixon delineating garment-coverage responsibility.

I only realised the magnitude of the wardrobe malfunction when I got back inside.  On a scale of 1 to 10, I rated it #%$*ing obvious.

I’m still trying to recall if we’d encountered neighbours that morning…

[oznl]

When we think of “noisy nappies”, we typically reflect upon the crunching/crinkling sounds that are unusual underwear choices often inflict upon us whenever we do something energetic, like standing up or walking.  These, whilst deafening to us, are most likely inaudible or at best, acoustically irrelevant to others but as a species, we like to find things to worry about.

The seed of this week’s notable nappy moment (noise based as it happens) sprang from my ever-infuriating “yo yo” cycle of nocturnal incontinence (bedwetting).   I’ll have weeks where I wet a few or even most nights and then I’ll have “dry at night” weeks.  This infuriating pattern has been sustained for quite some time now.

Followers of my story will know that I’m wary about prodding and poking my bedwetting behaviour too much since testing paradoxically tends to inhibit it.  Despite this known fact, I’d been going to bed in a deliberately-dry nappy usually once per week recently and for the last few weeks, have woken to find myself wet with 100% reliability.  This, allied with circumstantial evidence and the occasional “pee dreams” that may, or may not take place on those other nights had me considering the possibility that I’d transitioned to permanent bedwetting.

Saturday night cleared up THAT misconception.  I gone to bed (suitably refreshed by cheap Cabernet Merlot) in a perfectly dry Babykins pull-on cloth nappy.  I fully expected to be wet by the time I woke up so naturally, I was instead woken at 2am because I needed a pee.  Nothing sends the nocturnal pee fairies scurrying faster than my expectation of their visitation.

Compounding my disappointment at waking dry, I could distinctly feel that I needed to pee.   It seems THAT’S why I’d woken up.  I thought my bladder had lost the neurological form to fill in for that kind of permission.  It doesn’t ever get the chance to fill up these days.  But there it was.  A little crusty and perhaps even a little unfamiliar but bladder management was definitely banging on my brain’s office door waving a filled out form requesting a pee.

I decided to try and ignore it to see if I’d just fall back asleep and wet the bed.

That trick NEVER NEVER works for me.

An hour later, I REALLY needed to pee.  Maybe I had dozed but probably not.   Further sleep was out of the question.  This is what things were like back in 2018.   Frustrated, I gave up, opened the brain office door and spat “Just get ON with it then!” at the bladder management guy standing behind it.

It seemed however that the bladder management guy, so bewildered by the matter of being full, had forgotten what he needed to do with this permission now that he had it.  A series of painfully dry bladder spasms ensued (which I NEVER would have slept through) before finally, after what seemed like a VERY long minute or two, a kind of creeping heat and heavy closeness began emanating from the relevant zone deep inside my nappy evidencing that relief had at last arrived.   I guess this is one of the upsides of waking to pee during the night.   I find the sensation of wetting a nappy to be very pleasant and to be fair, in a bedwetting scenario this simple pleasure is missed.

It was a slow flow but as things settled down, my bladder stopped yelling at me, I began to relax, my underwear grew hot and humid around me I realised my pee flow was getting actually stronger.  This wasn’t one of my new-age drip and dribble type of pees, this was an old school flood.  I haven’t peed like this in a long time.  I wasn’t worried about leaking.  I had multiple cloth layers on and secure plastic pants but it was really starting to go for it down there. 

I just decided to enjoy the ride.  And then, in the quiet of a 3am bedroom, I realised I could distinctly hear myself “doing it”.

After the first few seconds of rapidly-warming silence, a quite noticeable trickling/gurgling noise began emanating from under the blankets.  I suspect that wet towelling had stopped absorbing in the critical area allowing my pee to flow back onto me and down my crotch where it could find asylum in dry padding around my bum.  If the “babbling brook” noise coming from my rapidly soggifying pants wasn’t enough, I realised that behind it, the distinct “hiss” of my pee stream bouncing off wet towelling could also now be heard.   I guess the word “piss” must be onomatopoeic (that’s your word of the week: you’re welcome).

It wasn’t deafening but it was probably, after the cat snoring, the most audible thing happening in the bedroom right now.  If I could hear it, so could my beloved was laying beside me.  I hoped that she was asleep.  Clear acoustic evidence that her husband was wetting his nappy next to her would be unlikely to be received favourably.

It seemed very loud.  Like a Feng Sui water feature, or a leak downstairs (which metaphorically, it kind of was).

I considered trying to stop but after more than 4 years of using nappies, I know that even a monumental effort at pausing the flow will at best, slow or stop it from a second or two before an equally monumental bladder spasm resumes my peeing with no further correspondence being entered into.

Instead, I shoved my hand down under the covers and pushed the front of my nappy up against me.  This had the desired effect, forcing pee to take the long way home via terry towelling instead of on-skin run-off.  Thusly, I completed wetting my pants in relative silence before warm, damp and relieved, I fell back asleep.

I’m left wondering though, does THAT happen on some nights where I AM asleep?  Does she HEAR me wetting my nappy when I don’t?  I’m hoping not.  It did seem that this night’s effort was the culmination of the conclusion of an uncharacteristic dry spell with something of a flood so I’m hoping it was (and shall remain) unusual.

Colour me white noise.

[zzyzx]

15 hours ago, oznl said:

Does she HEAR me wetting my nappy when I don’t? 

If she is awake while you are doing it, probably.  But it probably also doesn't compute into that's what you are doing.....

Yes, sometimes I have heard the noise of the stream hitting a boundary with force and bouncing back.  I don't normally hear that.

[oznl]

I attended a routine doctor’s appointment this morning.  Nothing serious: one of those nearly-pointless once-per-year fleeting check-ins to have a small number of trivial medication prescriptions and specialist referrals renewed because they have “expired” even though everyone from the receptionist upwards knows that I will be on that same clinical bus for whatever remains of my life.  It’s the kind of bureaucratic churn that makes modern medicine so lucrative.  The pandemic helped a little bit though, the increased medical workload giving rise to some small concessions in the name of overwhelming practicality.  I only now have to check-in in person every 12 months.  My prescriptions still only last for 6 months but for every alternate renewal, I can simply pay a reduced fee in order for my doctor to not actually have to look at me before signing the form he was always going to sign anyway.

I went to this face-to-face appointment sans nappy.  I haven’t seen him for a whole year and I just got a concerned feeling that THIS would be the time where he’d decide that it would be amusing, and even more profitable to insert tools up my arse.

He didn’t of course and I needn’t have deprived myself.

I’d earlier peeled off my wet cloth night nappy and had a quick rinse of the relevant areas under the shower before pulling on my sole-surviving tatty-red underpants. 

My jeans felt like a house that a whole family had just moved out of.  Without the comforting bulk of nappies, there was just so much ROOM down there!  I fully expected farts would echo.  I felt it was possible that the void at my crotch would be colonised by bats.   Getting into my car I felt light and flexible.  It occurred to me that this might be what losing 15Kg in weight would feel like.  For what was possibly the first time for that vehicle, I actually directly felt the contour of the seat beneath me.

I found the whole experience of spending a couple of hours nappy-free to be vaguely depressing though.

Firstly, was the inescapable fact that I’d “squibbed it” on grasping a nettle that, sooner or later, must be grasped.  It was a short appointment: a cursory blood pressure check (mediocre), a weigh-in (also mediocre, but no worse than previous ones) and some brief questions driven more out of imbuing a very short consult with a sense of occasion.

“Bladder and bowels ok?” he asked.

“They’re fine” I replied slightly ambiguously.

A more accurate answer would have been “A couple of times per week I will wet the bed.  I can’t hold pee from more than a couple of hours at best and when I DO pee, it takes ages and doesn’t so much finish as dissipate into dripping.  Oh, and the slightest gastric provocation (such as a dodgy chicken roll) may well see me uncontrollably crap my pants but that’s not the disaster it sounds to be because in fact, my pants are nappies and all this has happened because I let it.”

Doubtless, this would have led to a short, but excruciatingly awkward conversation that would have had him silently running a series of mental health checklists in his head behind a mahogany veneer of clinical indifference followed by some particularly salacious tea-room conversation with his triad of spectacularly-snooty medical receptionists whom I would never be able to look in the eye again.

Nope.  Instead, I opted for another trip around the tedious block known as “Safety St” and renewed another layer of deception that cloaks the real me, instead, chatting casually instead about the FIFA women’s world cup match the night before and joking about the likelihood of me outliving the cardiologist who had undoubtedly saved my life a decade ago. 

It was also depressing insofar as there were no dramas being out of nappies.  I didn’t uncontrollably wet myself.  Not one little bit.  I didn’t even come close.  Yes, it was a uncomfortable and I remained acutely aware of my undiapered state but in keeping with my suspicions, all I had was urgency. 

Back home, I needed to pee.  I retired to the bathroom, took off my underwear changing back into an old DPF Velcro/cloth nappy.  Over that I hauled up some milky white plastic pants and over that, some “shapeware” shorts to hold everything in place before zipping up my jeans over the lot.  I then decided NOT to pee and see how long I could last.

I made it nearly two more hours (nearly 3 hours in total) although the last bits were so uncomfortable to be painful.   I was vacuuming and the urges were so strong I had to stop.  It was then I realised I was uncontrollably spurting a bit in my nappy with each bladder spasm and that I was already a bit wet.  I guess I just don’t notice “a bit wet” so much anymore.  Eventually a spurt came that turned into a weak stream I seemed unable to do anything about.  There seemed no point trying anymore.  I just gave into it and flooded myself whilst sucking cat litter off a rug.

I didn’t flood though.  I thought I might leak but subsequent investigation showed that despite the Hollywood scale desperation, I hadn’t actually peed THAT much.  It seems that I was a little dehydrated from the previous evening football match celebration.  I just can’t hold it very well anymore and a bursting bladder does not mean any sizeable quantity of wee.

I expect this will all come out sooner or later.  I’ll get admitted to hospital for something or another and either they’ll wonder why I pee the bed, or, discover a nappy on me after in the ER after I get hauled out of an ambulance or both.  What a silly predicament to build for ourselves.  I just want to be left alone with my secret.  Only I and the whole internet know that I wear nappies not because I HAVE to but because I CHOOSE to and that I DON’T know why.

I guess that can is kicked a little further down the road, again…

[Stroller]

42 minutes ago, oznl said:

I expect this will all come out sooner or later.  I’ll get admitted to hospital for something or another and either they’ll wonder why I pee the bed, or, discover a nappy on me after in the ER after I get hauled out of an ambulance or both.  What a silly predicament to build for ourselves.  I just want to be left alone with my secret.  Only I and the whole internet know that I wear nappies not because I HAVE to but because I CHOOSE to and that I DON’T know why.

I guess that can is kicked a little further down the road, again…

I guess there's quite a few of us in a similar position.  I don't worry about it much though.  If I end up in hospital it'll have to be in nappies.  I wouldn't risk going anywhere unpadded now.  I've still no idea whether I could stop wetting if the urge came, but frankly I doubt I've got that control any more.  So if (or more likely when) I get outed in medical circles I'll have to own up to being IC & face the music I suppose.  Which I should think would be referring me to an IC consultant for a lecture on the options: pelvic floor exercises, drugs, surgery.  And then I'll say that Kegel doesn't work for me (a white lie), and that drugs and surgery are definitely out.  And then, I imagine, they'll leave me to my nappies in peace.

My AB side is a different matter.  In hospital I'd be desperate for my dummy and Teddy, but I suppose I'd have to manage without.  I could do that.  And Betterdry nappies rather than cloth or baby prints.

What's on my mind a bit more is what happens if I live to be so old I can't really manage to look after myself any more.  My mother's in that position now and we have to help her a lot.  Who's going to change my nappies when I can't do it myself any more?  I can see me having to tell my daughters all of the story at some point.

[Little Sherri]

On 8/10/2023 at 8:15 AM, oznl said:

I find the sensation of wetting a nappy to be very pleasant and to be fair, in a bedwetting scenario this simple pleasure is missed.

@oznl, enjoyable as always. When I don't look in for a bit and then there are a couple of entries, it's always a treat. 

I think that waking up and then releasing helps me fall back to sleep precisely because of what you pointed out above - it's a simple pleasure. I find it relaxing. That said, I prefer not to have to wake up to do this. I have hit-and-miss luck with that, more miss than hit. 

On 8/10/2023 at 8:15 AM, oznl said:

I realised I could distinctly hear myself “doing it”.

I had a thought about this yesterday, as a matter of fact - I was standing in my kitchen and reflexively started voiding, and then the dog looked at me. I couldn't hear anything (disposable under jeans), but his ears are about 500 times more effective than mine, so I gather he could. I've read of moments in stories where a character hears another character pee, and I never really bought that, but, that said, I have heard it the odd time in the silence of my office with only the clicking of my keyboard as background noise. 

 

On 8/17/2023 at 4:05 AM, Stroller said:

If I end up in hospital it'll have to be in nappies.  I wouldn't risk going anywhere unpadded now.  I've still no idea whether I could stop wetting if the urge came, but frankly I doubt I've got that control any more.  So if (or more likely when) I get outed in medical circles I'll have to own up to being IC & face the music I suppose.  Which I should think would be referring me to an IC consultant for a lecture on the options: pelvic floor exercises, drugs, surgery.  And then I'll say that Kegel doesn't work for me (a white lie), and that drugs and surgery are definitely out.  And then, I imagine, they'll leave me to my nappies in peace.

I've thought and mused about this many times, but my recent experience in accompanying my parents through the entrails of the medical system, as well as conversations with a relative who is training to be a nurse, have underlined something I'd long suspected was true: the nursing staff is fine, indeed, possibly thrilled, with you being in nappies voluntarily, and they won't care why, and their busy doctor overlords might never even ask about it. If you plan to manage your nappies yourself, so much the better, but even if it falls to them, they prefer that to either, A, having to rush to help you get to the toilet, or, B, having to change wet sheets. As well as concern C, which is that you might try to rush to the bathroom in an unsteady state and end up on the floor, possibly prolonging your stay. They much prefer to just deal with your nappy when they have a free moment then to be rushing in on your bladder's schedule. 

This was confirmed when my young relative was talking about her first experiences as a student nurse in a hospital's "rainbow ward", which is what they call the floor where they put seniors... but get THIS: that's where they put almost anybody over 50 who doesn't need specialized care. 50! 

She was saying that she watched a lady shower who didn't need to be watched while she showered, which she felt was a make-work project, and then she went and got the lady a diaper, and I said, "Out of curiosity, does her condition make those necessary, or did she have a preexisting need for them?", and she said that they encourage everyone on the rainbow ward to wear "briefs" (abysmal cloth-backed tabbed diapers) as a precaution to avoid falls. I asked how old the lady she was helping was, and she said 60, so I asked if she had mobility issues, and she said the lady was actually ran marathons, but was recovering from gallbladder surgery. She could walk fine. 

I was a bit incredulous, and said "So, they basically ask everyone to wear diapers, just in case?", and she said yes, it was voluntary, obviously, but every patient on that ward is given that advice. 

All of which is to say, the nurses likely won't question it. If you say "I have an overactive bladder and a history of bedwetting, I'm going to wear a nappy just in case...", they'll probably roll out the red carpet for you. They won't likely start an inquiry. It appears that we have "graduated" to an age where, in medical circles, nappies are not going to raise eyebrows. I'm a few years younger than you but I'm more or less in the same boat.