Thoughts on unpotty training and becoming incontinent

[Fattymatty]

I've been wearing diapers 24/7 for around a year now. As long as i can remember I've always wanted to wear diapers because i needed them, not because i had a fetish for them. At some point i said to myself what am i waiting for? There is never going to be a "good time." I just have to go for it. One day, randomly it seems, i woke up to a wet bed. I'd never been a bed wetter so I was excited and a little freaked out. After that I gained the courage i needed to take it further. I had long ago come to the conclusion that full incontinence, while fun, would be too disruptive to maintaining a "normal life." Not only that but sudden full incontinence would be really hard to explain to those around me. Becoming urinary incontinent on the other hand seemed reasonable and obtainable. So i started wetting the bed and my pants every chance i got. I wet my pants at work. At home. In public places. In front of friends and in front of family. After a while the embarrassment faded and changing my pants multiple times a day became normal for me and wet pants didn't bother me anymore. Those around me and the people that knew me understood that eventually I'd wet myself and have to change my clothes because of it.

 It was my family doctor who first suggested that I should wear "Depends" to protect myself. It was after that visit that my doctor put in my medical records a diagnoses of "urinary incontinence." For some reason seeing that written in my medical record gave me the freedom to wear diapers without any feelings of guilt. I had gotten the medical excuse that I was subconsciously looking for.

I started wearing Depends pull-ups but found that they leaked and were ironically more expensive than actual tab style diapers while being less absorbent. It wasn't long until i transitioned into wearing tab style diapers 24/7. I found that wearing cloth diapers at night while wearing disposables during the daytime was the winning combo for me. Wearing diapers is like anything else it seems. Once you get into a routine that works for you time can go by rather quickly and it did for me.

I don't remember at what point the bed wetting really took off. It started with not getting out of bed in the middle of the night to pee and wetting while i was still partially awake, making sure i was able to pee without pushing. Then one or two wet beds a week turned into three and now just about everynight i wet my bed or diapers while I'm asleep. 

Daytime incontinence has been harder to achieve. I would guess that I'm probably halfway there. I never hold back and always let go the instant the urge is present. Wetting while sitting still requires pushing down I find that most of the time when i wet is when I'm standing or walking around. I've tried not to put too much thought into it, that seems to be the real key in all of this. Just don't think about it. The more I let my body do it's thing without concentrating on my bodily functions the easier everything becomes. 

That's really what i wanted to get across here. For me at least all of the hurdles to incontinence have been mental not physical and I'm slowly getting passed them. I have no doubt that one year from now I'll be 100% urinary incontinent and diaper dependant just as my medical records describe and i couldn't be happier about it.

Have patience, wear diapers and use them as they were intended and you will become incontinent given enough time. After all incontinence is not something that you should be able to flip on and off like a light switch. If being incontinent is what will make you happy and it's what you truly want in life you should go for it. 

[stevewet]

Thank you for writing this I hope it encourages others. I am genuinely a happier and more relaxed person since I became incontinent and dependant on nappies 24/7. Returning to nightly bedwetting was like finding an old friend.

[oznl]

My current stint of 24/7 is coming up to 14 months and like yourself, I’ve made zero effort to control peeing for that time but I still actively manage messing to avoid dramas.

I wasn’t actively seeking incontinence but I was certainly doing nothing to avoid it.

Like yourself, I’ve drifted into a pattern of intermittent bed wetting (well in-bed-diaper-wetting to be particular although there have been leaks here and there).  This was something that first showed after several months of 24/7.  First rarely, but over time it became more common.  It came about slowly.  Normally I would awaken and deliberately wet myself a bit a couple of times every night.  Over time, it seemed the frequency of this grew more and more (up to about 5 times but with very small quantities) and  the amount of waking-up I needed to achieve this grew less and less until I started finding myself sometimes unable to remember specifically waking to do it the next morning.  To put this in context, before this, I hadn’t wet the bed accidentally since I was 3 (more than 50 years ago).

It’s still variable. For the last couple of nights I’ve been waking up to wet but it won’t last.  I still suspect that if I went to bed without a nappy, I might remain dry but have a bad night’s sleep.  I haven’t had a safe opportunity to test this hypothesis.

I still regard myself as continent during the day although an experiment at the 1 year mark for 24/7 showed that I only lasted about 2 hours without a nappy before I started leaking in my underwear out of sheer urgency, despite not having that full a bladder.

  I have control, to an extent.

Not long after that, I supervised some work at a remote site.  By about lunchtime, I realised that my contractors had been working just fine without a break but there was absolutely NO way I could have operated there without regularly using my nappy.  I just did not have that kind of bladder capacity.

Have you actually tried testing yourself?

I’m a bit surprised that your family doctor would be so incurious about idiopathic incontinence.  I would have thought he or she would have wanted to get to a root cause on that to rule out something significant going on.  For the handful of brief medical appointments that I've had so far, it's been 30 minutes or so and I can manage without a nappy although it isn't comfortable for me anymore.

[Fattymatty]

It sounds like your situation pretty closely mirrors mine. I have not tested myself however i have peed on the floor a couple times when getting out of the shower and before i could get protection on stuff like that. I'm sure that my control level has lessened but I'm not too keen on the idea of going back to regular underwear even if it is for a short amount of time to test myself. I don't want to ever send the message to my body that it can't let go whenever and where ever it wants to. I know it's silly. But It's a part of the mental barriers that I'm trying to overcome.

My doctor did plenty of tests to try and get to the root cause but stopped short of prescribing medication for it. Saying instead that the best things i could do to fix it (if i wanted to of course) were lifestyle related and wearing protection was an exceptable option to help manage it in the meantime. After that I've been back several times for other things wearing a diaper and nothing is said one way or the other about it. It's just the kind of underwear i wear. 

 

[oznl]

55 minutes ago, Fattymatty said:

It sounds like your situation pretty closely mirrors mine. I have not tested myself however i have peed on the floor a couple times when getting out of the shower and before i could get protection on stuff like that. I'm sure that my control level has lessened but I'm not too keen on the idea of going back to regular underwear even if it is for a short amount of time to test myself. I don't want to ever send the message to my body that it can't let go whenever and where ever it wants to. I know it's silly. But It's a part of the mental barriers that I'm trying to overcome.

My doctor did plenty of tests to try and get to the root cause but stopped short of prescribing medication for it. Saying instead that the best things i could do to fix it (if i wanted to of course) were lifestyle related and wearing protection was an exceptable option to help manage it in the meantime.

 

I found myself also strangely diffident about consciously exercising continence but I felt I needed to understand where my body was at after a year diapered.  I don't think that single venture really recovered anything.  If anything I was slightly reassured that if I absolutely needed to, I could hang on for a short while.

I do intend to see if I wet the bed without nappies but I need my spouse to be away for this to happen and with lock-down, she's not going anywhere.  Our mattress has a waterproof sheet so it won't be the end of the world but she will freak out if she finds out I have done this to myself.  If it turns out I truly do wet the bed irrespective of being diapered, I need to factor that in to my plans.

Things have continued to progress at daytime though.  Generally I'll be a bit "drippy" whilst showering.  Just sometimes, it seems like it would be such a monumental effort to clench down in between drying off and re-diapering myself, that I'll just hold a nappy against myself as I move around until I can put on some rash cream and diaper myself properly.  I suspect I could stop this from happening if I tried hard enough but trying hard enough just seems too hard.

[BlakeJordan]

I found myself also strangely diffident about consciously exercising continence but I felt I needed to understand where my body was at after a year diapered.  I don't think that single venture really recovered anything.  If anything I was slightly reassured that if I absolutely needed to, I could hang on for a short while.
I do intend to see if I wet the bed without nappies but I need my spouse to be away for this to happen and with lock-down, she's not going anywhere.  Our mattress has a waterproof sheet so it won't be the end of the world but she will freak out if she finds out I have done this to myself.  If it turns out I truly do wet the bed irrespective of being diapered, I need to factor that in to my plans.
Things have continued to progress at daytime though.  Generally I'll be a bit "drippy" whilst showering.  Just sometimes, it seems like it would be such a monumental effort to clench down in between drying off and re-diapering myself, that I'll just hold a nappy against myself as I move around until I can put on some rash cream and diaper myself properly.  I suspect I could stop this from happening if I tried hard enough but trying hard enough just seems too hard.

It is wired being on the other side. This journey is as much about tipping points as anything else. It’s funny how at the beginning you focus so hard to create a habit and reflex that can be pushed into the background eventually so as not to be a distraction. At some point you realize that you’re in the opposite position that it now requires a concerted and concentrated effort to hold that body awareness and attention to biological signals that you’ve come to ignore.

All at once you realize the effort is no longer to push things into the background but rather the effort is to pull them into the foreground so that you have the choice to choose rather than react.

This is definitely one of the strongest indicators I know of that your at the edge of a precipice you may not be able to come back from if you continue to venture forward.

I hypothesize this is due to the mental work being done so as to change the default mode. Since the default is now to react with a conscious decision being made the changes in communication between the nervous system and brain can start a snowball effect that can have physical changes including atrophy; both of the muscles and neurological patterns.

In my experience with this path you can get to the point rather quickly of pre-potty training. That is to say that if you wish to retrain it is both a physical and mental effort. It is also the point where not having protection puts you at a higher likelihood of actual accidents. Yes you might be able to to clamp down quickly but only after you become aware of the wetness. In order to maintain control you also need to keep a constant focus much like you did when trying to stay relaxed at the beginning.

I do believe it is possible to regain much control, if needed and desired, but it requires going through the same journey you had as a toddler. Just like most toddlers the bed wetting is likely to be last to recover, and possibly not at all.

[oznl]

30 minutes ago, BlakeJordan said:

It is wired being on the other side. This journey is as much about tipping points as anything else. It’s funny how at the beginning you focus so hard to create a habit and reflex that can be pushed into the background eventually so as not to be a distraction. At some point you realize that you’re in the opposite position that it now requires a concerted and concentrated effort to hold that body awareness and attention to biological signals that you’ve come to ignore.

All at once you realize the effort is no longer to push things into the background but rather the effort is to pull them into the foreground so that you have the choice to choose rather than react.

This is definitely one of the strongest indicators I know of that your at the edge of a precipice you may not be able to come back from if you continue to venture forward.

I hypothesize this is due to the mental work being done so as to change the default mode. Since the default is now to react with a conscious decision being made the changes in communication between the nervous system and brain can start a snowball effect that can have physical changes including atrophy; both of the muscles and neurological patterns.

In my experience with this path you can get to the point rather quickly of pre-potty training. That is to say that if you wish to retrain it is both a physical and mental effort. It is also the point where not having protection puts you at a higher likelihood of actual accidents. Yes you might be able to to clamp down quickly but only after you become aware of the wetness. In order to maintain control you also need to keep a constant focus much like you did when trying to stay relaxed at the beginning.

I do believe it is possible to regain much control, if needed and desired, but it requires going through the same journey you had as a toddler. Just like most toddlers the bed wetting is likely to be last to recover, and possibly not at all.

To put this in context, none this is an "always" thing for me right now so I don't feel like I've stepped off any precipices.  It seems to come and go.  For the last few nights, I can distinctly recall wetting events and would consider myself as having been fully continent, just simply choosing to void in my diapers.

Today, I'm sitting at my desk dozing through an online work meeting and I'm quite drippy and dribbly in my ABU Simple and it would seem like such an effort and uncomfortable to bother about imposing some kind of control.

Yesterday was the complete reverse.  I was out providing driving instruction to a teenager.  If any scenario would induce involuntary urination you would think that one would tick the box.  I found myself repeatedly "stuck".  I could tell I had a bit of pee that really I should let my nappy deal with so as to avoid a later flood but it was hard to start.

It does not seem to be a linear descent but rather wildly fluctuating.

I do wonder about the bedwetting thing:  SO many people have told me that this would be the LAST thing to happen, not the first...

[BlakeJordan]

To put this in context, none this is an "always" thing for me right now so I don't feel like I've stepped off any precipices.  It seems to come and go.  For the last few nights, I can distinctly recall wetting events and would consider myself as having been fully continent, just simply choosing to void in my diapers.
Today, I'm sitting at my desk dozing through an online work meeting and I'm quite drippy and dribbly in my ABU Simple and it would seem like such an effort and uncomfortable to bother about imposing some kind of control.
Yesterday was the complete reverse.  I was out providing driving instruction to a teenager.  If any scenario would induce involuntary urination you would think that one would tick the box.  I found myself repeatedly "stuck".  I could tell I had a bit of pee that really I should let my nappy deal with so as to avoid a later flood but it was hard to start.
It does not seem to be a linear descent but rather wildly fluctuating.
I do wonder about the bedwetting thing:  SO many people have told me that this would be the LAST thing to happen, not the first...

Context upon context here, haha.

I have a hypothesis that has been in development for some time of how neuro patterns are the underpinnings of all this. By all this I mean the habits of when and where to control your bladder.

When I refer to the default mode it is the brain’s default neuro pattern that is active or would be activated in a particular situation, stimuli, etc. The reason why there can be a bleeding effect is because as we exercise and reinforce a specific pattern it gets stronger and more easily activated. If the brain has the choice of more than one strong patterns it’s going to choose one to be dominant, the go to, the default. This is where the tipping point comes in. As there has been such an effort in so many situations of just letting go and nature taking its course, even if it’s not intentional, it can become the default mode in one or more situations. Once this patter. Becomes dominant in one situation it is very easy for the neuro pattern to “reach out” and spread across more situations, maybe not being dominant at first, but certainly becoming stronger as it has more neurons that will trigger that pattern. Eventually those unintended, but not avoided situations can trigger the same pattern and the brain can even decide it prefers that pattern. This is where the snowball effect comes in.

To explain the driving experience you mention I would bet that there are physical barriers that have not changed enough. Driving or sitting in general is often a huge barrier for many to wet freely and comfortable. This is due to pressure on various parts of the body, posture, more difficult shifting positions etc. This can be enough to stop that default mode, at least for awhile.

Of effort, intentional practice is made to be able to easily wet in that specific position, the pattern that makes this ease of wetting, at a conscious level while being in a car (shifting weight, lifting hips, all the fidgeting etc) can activate or get activated as the two patterns become wired together and thus can trigger one another.

Onto bed wetting. It is accepted in many medical circles that bed wetting is habitual rather than structural. This is why it’s so hard to stop and start, and why it’s so tightly coupled to what is worn etc. the habit, and therefore the default mode is both unconscious, and subconscious. Meaning, all other things being equal the brain will rely on the default mode for the specific circumstance. At first this can be tied or coupled very closely with only in diapers for instance. But as diapers become the dominant/majority that pattern again gets highly reinforced, meanwhile the pattern of not wetting when not wetting gets weaker and may even get pruned. Both are culprits to eventually wetting while not diapered; that bleeding effect.

I don’t think it gets mentioned often enough, but bed wetting most often occurs Between sleep cycles, or at the very end of them. It is also typical for anyone to wake up for 1-3 minutes between sleep cycles- this is actually normal and something people don’t typically remember (this occurs to most everyone and is independent of bed wetting). Just like everyone else, and just like bed welters this is the most likely time for someone to both wake up AND wet the bed, and both are likely not to be consolidated to long term memory or even recalled upon or shortly after waking.

This neuro pattern hypothesis also has another implication, in that it not coupled to the physical strength of any muscles. All of the keeping relaxed is what reinforces the pattern, and although the weakness is correlated with higher levels of loss of control, it is not required and is merely a result of the most efficient ways of staying relaxed. Once those patterns become default there are only coupled to the relaxed state and not the physical strength. Later on as I mentioned all of this can have physical results/impacts once the nervous system (ANS specifically) gets involved through brain body communications.


Going back to your points on this not being an all the time thing, that doesn’t change the unintended neuro pattern bleeding that could hit that tipping point. It also explains the ups and downs as there as many variables in any situation the can cause one pattern to be chosen by default over another, when the brain has multiple strong patterns to chose from.

Specifically I would guess that small amounts of alcohol are enough to filter out some of those variables and result in the wet mornings. This can also be seen as a sign that the two competing patterns are about equal strength right now and which one that gets activated is highly coupled to the variables in a specific situation. It also points to the tipping point already being present and the possibility of the unconscious wetting pattern to gain even more strength and reinforcement while the conscious wetting simultaneously losing strength, and thus leading to the snowball effect.

.....pretty much this entire hypothesis is centered upon and pulls from different areas of neurology, psychology, physiology as well as to a lesser degree personal experience.

[Greg03]

My unpotty training was subconscious or in denial, depending how you look at it. I’m a life long bedwetter, I’ve always worn a nappy to bed. But until around 3 years ago, I considered myself day dry.

having the peace of mind not to have to worry about staying dry has always been important to me in being able to relax and unwind, so I’d usually put on a nappy in the early evening. Or longer journeys, or when watching a movie. I’d use my nappy, mostly out of convenience.

until gradually, the “little accidents” started. I’d be unable to make it to the bathroom on time and start off my pee in my underwear. Or afterwards I’d carry on dribbling. But everyone has wet underwear, right? The realisation came when I at the cinema, without protection. I told myself I didn’t really need it, then was on edge the whole time drying to stay dry. 
 

i realised the pressure I was putting myself under and the level of accidents I was having and began wearing pull ups during the day. Now I’m in thick nappies full time and the peace of mind is wonderful. If you are truly open to it and it’s the right thing for you, it will happen. Just be patient 

[Fattymatty]

On 5/24/2020 at 4:32 PM, Fattymatty said:

I have not tested myself however i have peed on the floor a couple times when getting out of the shower and before i could get protection on stuff like that. I'm sure that my control level has lessened but I'm not too keen on the idea of going back to regular underwear even if it is for a short amount of time to test myself. I don't want to ever send the message to my body that it can't let go whenever and where ever it wants to. I know it's silly. But It's a part of the mental barriers that I'm trying to overcome.

 

 

I'm not sure what triggered this for me but the other day i went a couple hours diaper free just wearing an old pair of boxer shorts and pants around the house while doing house work. I even laid on the couch and took a short nap without wearing protection against my better judgement. I woke up dry but knowing that i would need to pee soon and I planned on making a trip to the bathroom after switching the laundry. I was able to get the dry clothes out of the dryer before the pressure became too much and I couldn't hold it any more. I went from knowing i needed to pee to uncontrollably wetting myself in about a minute.

Clean up was easy because i was already standing in the laundry room where there were plenty of towels and clothes to change into. After that i diapered myself back up and scolded myself for being so stupid. I could have easily ruined the couch i was sleeping on or my family could have seen my accident. It's better to wear the diapers, It was foolish of me to think i could wear normal underwear and be accident free after wearing diapers for as long as i have, perhaps i was tempting fate. I'm still not sure what was going through my head at the time.

From what I've learned, you can't know for certain how incontinent you are if you are never trying to keep your pants dry so when i actaully tried and failed so fast it was a bit of a wake up call. I'm not sure when i crossed the line of partially undoing my potty training and legitimately needing to wear protection but it has definitely happened and it happened without me even realizing it. 

[Mindylou]

I guess this is the topic I need to post in.. I've been almost a year knowing I'm a DL. Within the last few months I've started going almost 24/7 padded.. thick Abena pull-ups during the day and diapers every night. I do use the pull-ups as diapers because I try to leave my muscles relaxed to where I don't control my pee. I really have no urge to go to the bathroom because I go in my pull-up but just a little at a time. I'm beginning to not hardly notice I need to and it just comes out. Last night I woke myself up peeing hard! This is what I have wanted and I can still control if need be.. but it's difficult to not just want go when I want.  I enjoy this journey and I have a Very understanding spouse who diapers me and treats me like a baby when I get in that mood. So that's where I'm at. 

[Lillemai]

Hey Fattymatty,
It's now a year since you wrote this post and I'm currently on my "one year mark", just as you were when you wrote this.

I wonder what progress you made this past year. Have you reached your goal in becoming incontinent?

[Enthusi]

I completely agree that having incontinence on your medical record is extremely liberating. It scared me tom half to death discussing with my doc but I’m so glad it’s on my record because it’s one less thing if something bad happens and I need emergent care and someone sees me in a diaper. 

[stevewet]

1 hour ago, Enthusi said:

I completely agree that having incontinence on your medical record is extremely liberating. It scared me tom half to death discussing with my doc but I’m so glad it’s on my record because it’s one less thing if something bad happens and I need emergent care and someone sees me in a diaper. 

 

1 hour ago, Enthusi said:

I completely agree that having incontinence on your medical record is extremely liberating. It scared me tom half to death discussing with my doc but I’m so glad it’s on my record because it’s one less thing if something bad happens and I need emergent care and someone sees me in a diaper. 

my medical records state I am incontinent and enuretic

[PuddlePants]

I started unpotty training with my new husband being the one to help me go from continent to incontinent. He started by having me hold it only until I had the first urge to go potty. 

We had big washable absorbent pads around the house. I started by intentionally wetting my pants while standing on the absorbent pads, or by standing on the back porch in the dark and wetting my pants. I would then have to go to him and tell him I had an accident. He would admonish me to make me feel the embarrassment of peeing my pants. 

We did this every day all day for the first month because I was working from home. If I had to force an accident when he wasn't home I was to take pictures and report my accidents. I would get spanked for them as well. This helped affirm that it was a bad behavior having accidents in my pants. 

The next step he took was he bought diapers and pull-ups but I could use them until he was sure that I was going to NEED them. 

He bought a bedside commode, a camp toilet and then a baby potty for training me to not use the big girl potty. 

The first thought of needing to go I was to go to the big girl potty for a month and track my urine output. 

I was to stop trying to hold it. If I had the brain process, "my bladder needs to empty." I was to go empty my bladder in the big girl toilet with the measurement hat in it. For a month we watched my output drop from 2 cups to 1.5 cups during measured voiding. I was voiding at 4-6 hours during the day. I'd wet the bed pad a few times a month. 

He then did 1 month of having me pee every 3 hours during the day, regardless of need. Again recording volume. My volume reduced from 1.5 cups to 1 cup or even less sometimes. 

He reduced me to peeing in the measured toilet every 90 minutes regardless of need. I averaged about 6oz at each void. I started wetting the bed nightly.

He decided to put me in pull-ups at night. I woke up with a wet pullup daily and sometimes woke up in the middle of the night needing a change. Hubby switched me to nighttime adult diapers at this point.

Then he dropped it down to making myself void every 45 minutes. My volume dropped to 2-4oz per void. I wet my diapers every night, but not always fully.

He then switched me to a custom built potty. It was a baby potty chair mounted to an adult height wooden potty stool. I was to stop every 30 minutes and go pee on the kid potty. I started having accidents during the day and wet my pants just enough to see I'd visibly tinkled. I fully wet my diapers at night. 

He then made me start trying to hold it 1 hour while I did dishes or something like that. I'd almost always have an accident and pee my pants. He'd have me send pictures to him to report the accident. I would be told to put on clean big girl clothes or a pullup. And go the full hour or drop back to using the little kid potty every 30 minutes. I was voiding less than 1/4 cup when i went every 30 minutes. 

Then he switched me to daytime pull-ups, but I would need to "go potty" on the kids potty every 20, 40, or 90 minutes depending on his whim that day. If I went in my pullup at any point I was to report it to him. And then we stayed with this variable time frame for intentionally voiding or not. If I needed to change my wet pullup he required pictures and I needed permission to change. 

One day he was home and I'd woken up with a fully wet diaper and he kept me in it most of the day. I was encouraged to drink more water and he set the timer for 80 minutes, I'd felt myself wet 4 times during the 80 minutes. I didn't pee at all outside my diaper at the 80 minute mark.

He then wanted to keep me in just a pair of panties for the weekend at home. I wet my panties after 5 minutes. He decided that he'd keep me in pull-ups from then on. As soon as I felt myself wet I had to tell him. And he'd do a diaper check to see if I needed to be changed. I started having more frequent little leaks of pee into my pull-ups and wetting my nighttime diapers fully by morning. 

After a 3 month period of just going in my pull-ups he had me start trying to hold it again. I got up to about 2 hours before I'd lose control and wet my pull-up. He switched me to heavier nighttime diapers and I would wake up with a full diaper and a feeling of needing to pee and then nothing until he changed me and I realized that I didn't think about peeing or that I'd had to go.

My daytime was heavier pull-ups or diapers for periods where he or I couldn't change me right away. 

He took away my big girl potty privileges at home. I could still "use" the potty at friends houses or in public but I couldn't actually use the toilet, only appear to do so.

I started to notice that I didn't realize that I had to pee or that I had peed unless I felt my pull-ups for a diaper check.

I had 6 big kidney stones and then surgery in January and have had nerve issues since. Now I have issues where sometimes my nerves let my body know to hold urine and then I'll get an urge to go potty but mostly I have very little retention capability and I almost never know that I've gone potty until I feel my bottom get damp.

My family knows I'm medically urine incontinent. My doctors know. Only hubby knows that I enjoy not having to find a bathroom or think about going potty before I leave the house. 

Due to the nerve issue, he does most of my diaper changes, even when we're out. It's easier to keep track of my skin condition this way. 

We have a diaper bag and I've sewn most of my PUL covers for diapers. I enjoy the freedom of not having to freak out about finding a bathroom like I did when I was growing up. 

 

 

 

[Diapered Dave]

On 5/19/2021 at 9:03 AM, Enthusi said:

I completely agree that having incontinence on your medical record is extremely liberating. It scared me tom half to death discussing with my doc but I’m so glad it’s on my record because it’s one less thing if something bad happens and I need emergent care and someone sees me in a diaper. 

Yes! I know the feeling.. My medical records were updated almost a year ago, showing "Enuresis".  (Bedwetting..) I have a physical in a month, and I suspect my doc will ask me if I'm still wetting at night.. (Well of course I am!! )

[sparklezBear]

Reaching incontinence is something that has been on my mind for a long while, before I even contemplated 24/7 if truth be told. However, since reaching my 24/7 goal, it's a more fore and centre. To that end, I would like to achieve profound urinary incontinence this year. I say profound urinary incontinence as I already have a measure thus far.

Currently I'm a regular bed-wetter, have a degree of stress incontinence and am otherwise just leaky at times. My bed-wetting started in full only last year in July or so, quite wilfully. It started off as happening now and then, progressing over just a few months to my nightly bed-wetting that I enjoy now. I would not dare to sleep without a nappy now, not that I ever planning on doing so ever again.

With the stress incontinence and other leakiness that I enjoy now, this was mostly caused by a previous surgery which weakened my pelvic floor. So much so that I had to exercise my pelvic floor years ago following the surgery to regain control. It's my solemn hope that by neglecting my pelvic floor, incontinence will increase beyond just functional incontinence. I believe this is the cause behind my increasing stress incontinence, which in simple terms is incontinence when there's an amount of abdominal pressure from activity or other. It's my surgery and weak pelvic floor is behind my general leakiness which had been worsening for the last couple of years anyway.

Somewhere about 6 months ago I told my doctor that I experience bed-wetting, using "pads" to manage this. This was received well, and no further inquiry was made at the time. Since then, in response to some genuine faecal incontinence, I did start some investigations. During my initial appointment with a specialist, they wanted to test and eventually strengthen my pelvic floor. Given that runs counter to my current aims, and for the purpose of protecting my job, I came clean and told my doctor that I wear nappies 24/7, both for comfort (managing my anxiety) and to manage incontinence episodes that I had been experiencing. I also mentioned that I expect my incontinence will worsen, which I am okay with. While it was a difficult conversation, it was more or less well received. I don't yet know what, if anything, made it to my medical record so far.

So, since going 24/7, I'm definitely experiencing more stress incontinence and other leakiness. It's quite normal for a pitta-patter of drops between nappies, such as when I'm heading to or from the shower after waking. It's also much easier to push past a closed sphincter in those increasingly few times when stress peaks and interrupts a normal unfettered flow. I've also kept experiencing faecal incontinence at times, although it's not common. Or perhaps it's less common as I've stopped trying to control this while at home, happy to use my nappies for their intended purpose. Otherwise 24/7 nappy use is still relatively new and a challenge to figure out at times given leaks and changing can be problematic in different situations. Then there's choosing the right nappy for the task, skin integrity and thinking about supplies. 

Currently I'm planning on another conversation with my doctor in the not-too-distant-future. I want to check that I now have enuresis and some other form of incontinence on my medical record. This will be needed for a hospital visit later in the year which I will be doing in nappies. I don't have any doubt that my doctor will oblige given that the effect is just as genuine even if I wasn't wearing nappies. 

With all of that said, how do I feel about that, about being and helping to make myself incontinent? Fucking wonderful ?. Nappies and IC for life!

[stevewet]

On 5/25/2021 at 5:11 AM, Diapered Dave said:

Yes! I know the feeling.. My medical records were updated almost a year ago, showing "Enuresis".  (Bedwetting..) I have a physical in a month, and I suspect my doc will ask me if I'm still wetting at night.. (Well of course I am!! )

My diabetic nurse always asks me if I still "bedwet" as she puts it.