Wives and incontinence

My heart doc told me that just because I drink coffee from the time I get up until I go to bed it does not hydrate me. He said I could be dying of thirst in the desert and find a thermos of coffee that it would not help with the dying of thirst. I doesn't make sense to me because it is just flavored water but he says it is the truth. go figure
 
May likely be from the effects of caffeine causing frequency, irritation, and its diuretic effect.
 
Not sure where you live, but certainly here in Wales (UK) the recommended amount is still 1.5 to 2 liters a day. Speaking as an insulin dependent diabetic I feel thirsty most of time, so I do try to make the minimum.
 
and as daft as it sounds Alcohol, even beer dehydrates you more than it hydrates you. So whilst the odd beer or pils on a very hot day may be refreshing it's not doing anything to help replace lost fluid.
 
Yah, it’s dehydrated the Hell out of me more than once!!!
 
Yeah, I think alcohol is a stronger diuretic than caffeine, and alcoholic drinks certainly don’t hydrate you in the longer term. Most caffeinated drinks probably have a net positive hydration effect, although perhaps not strong coffee or energy drinks. In any case, you need to have at least some drinks that don’t contain alcohol or caffeine.
 
ChocChip said:
Yeah, I think alcohol is a stronger diuretic than caffeine, and alcoholic drinks certainly don’t hydrate you in the longer term. Most caffeinated drinks probably have a net positive hydration effect, although perhaps not strong coffee or energy drinks. In any case, you need to have at least some drinks that don’t contain alcohol or caffeine.
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I actually recently read that moderate coffee intake does in fact have a positive net hydration effect, but that goes away if you drink a lot of it.

The acidity of coffee and it's diuretic effects are both bladder irritants...but I LOVE my coffee and will never give it up over my continence issues....Only way I'd give up coffee is if there was a 99% chance that it would completely cure my incontinence...which is obviously not the case.

Alcohol is a strong diuretic. It's a poison that your body wants to flush out asap. But, everything in moderation, right?
 
My wife has been very proactive in my management of my bladder ic and has suggested pads, pants and all the items one needs to cope with this, she regularly orders disposables and cloth Nappies and always gets the best deal on them, however I would not dream of letting her see me in my Nappy/plastic pants although I feel sure he has had glimpses of me in them and thst is just one reason I feel discretion is the best part of valour
I accompanied by my wife have done all the consultations on operations and medicines as well and the bottom line we both decided is thst any of the operations offered had poor success rate and any failures were seriously bad for future health., the medicines all had awful side effects with a few being positively harmful (eyesight affected) joint pain and the list just goes on.

I love her deeply and know she reciprocates and we both joke about how leaky we both are as my poor wife also has slight issues to the point that she has a couple of packs of Tena silhouette pull ups in her cupboard and I am very supportive of her buying her needs in bulk and even going and buying them for her on rare occassions.
Being a long established Nappy lover I am of course happy to wear Nappies even though I now have no choice in wearing as my bladder ic is also turning into BM incontinence which I am not happy about as there is a terrific difference between voluntarily messing and an accident.
Being D/L does make incontinence more of a nuisance than a real trial ☺
 
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When my IC started, I didn't have the faintest idea of why or what to do about it. My wife was the one that suggested that maybe when I went shopping, that I might "need a diaper". But after I started wearing pull-ups (full time), she wasn't too keen on it and later thought maybe I was becoming a DL. After the tests from the doctor's office concluded that it was neurogenic bladder (from diabetes), then she accepted it.

Then she thought that I would be ok with drug-store pull-ups, but they were usually insufficient for Saturday mornings out shopping/errands. Now she just trusts me to pick my own protection.

Later when overnight became an issue and I had wet the bed on a few occasions, she had less resistance to me doing something about it (she really hated the wet bed). At about the same time, I had to take an 8 hour trip to a cabin with some friends and this helped her accept my need to wear a MegaMax to keep my secret amongst the guys on the trip. So now she accepts my need to wear a diaper and plastic pants to bed every night. All of this acceptance has taken time for her (not just myself). We tend to look only at our own acceptance issues and expect that the wife will just accept it. But the stigma is real and deep seated in some families.

I think it helps that I keep it low profile, like wearing PJs over my diapers. In the beginning I shared a lot of what was happening with her but soon found that she really didn't want to know (TMI). She knows that I need to wear diapers and and just leaves it at that. There is also the possibility that a spouse could be secretly jealous about your diaper wearing but doesn't want to reveal that. These associations and feelings can make your transition to IC tricky in a marriage.
 
Wow this is kinda a old thread I hope it all worked out. My wife knew when we met and we was just kids. she has always been supportive and use to buy my diapers when I purchased in the store. In sickness and health it means a lot to me and Incontinence is not your fault. It sounds like you went to the doctor more than once so clearly it is a real issue. My wife was 2 weeks from being 18 when we married. At age 23 she had rectal cancer and needed a permanent colostomy. I have never judged and I have helped her many of times when she needed me. I am 45 now and she is 44. In the last 2 years she has gotten stress IC as well. My point being is it could be her just as easy. In fact women are more prone than men by far. people that truly love each other will always accept each others faults. Especially health matters out of your control.
 
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slimjiminy said:
There is also the possibility that a spouse could be secretly jealous about your diaper wearing but doesn't want to reveal that. These associations and feelings can make your transition to IC tricky in a marriage.
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I think of how often my wife has to get up in the middle of the night to use the toilet and frankly, I don't miss THAT (I was doing that routine 4 and 5 times a night). I wonder sometimes if some people don't start wearing just because they need to get a decent night's sleep.
 
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PCBaby said:
yep we should all aim for a minimum of 2 litres of water a day. Tea and Coffee don't count. Although I bet most people with IC don't get close to that.
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I am about 3000 to 3500 ml a day and got down with the incontinence from 4000 ml or even more.
Last year i did try to get down more, but that worsened my dizziness a lot.

Now there is a reason for me drinking that much, it is related to POTS and Hypovolemia, my body tries to compensate the low blood volume.

Of course that makes my bladder problems not better.
 
tiltedg said:
I think of how often my wife has to get up in the middle of the night to use the toilet and frankly, I don't miss THAT (I was doing that routine 4 and 5 times a night). I wonder sometimes if some people don't start wearing just because they need to get a decent night's sleep.
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Same with my wife. She complains every morning about how many times she had to get up. In this sense I appreciate my bedwetting and diapers. I wake every morning wet, but fully rested.

in the beginning when my incontinence started my wife did try and lecture me not just give in and use my diaper, out of fear of becoming completely diaper dependent. For years I have not heard her mentioning anything related to me needing to wear. its a thing which we all know about, but don’t talk about. Which I’m fine with, I don’t have any need to talk about it anyway.
 
My fiance knows that I wet the bed and wear diapers. In the mornings she'll ask me if my diaper is wet and tell me to change or she'll hand me a clean diaper, which I'll keep on for a few hours after I get up. After that diaper I'll switch to a pullup.
 
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My wife does not like to talk about it, she accepts it, no complaining at all.

I do my best to be discrete and not to bother her but it is not always that easy. In the last weeks it got better, a little, she tries at least to think of my problem when planning trips or something like that. It is difficult for me sometimes.

In the last weeks i had more problems when lying down for fatigue during the day, i nearly wet every time now and wake up to late or take to long to get up and last night i had my first accident during the night. So i am basically 24/7 now, not easy for me to accept and i am worried my wife will be upset when she realizes i have to wear to bed all the time.
 
I think that she'll accept it without a fuss. She won't like it anymore than you do but learning that this is something beyond your control, I would think she will sympathize. Your approach is good by not making it more of an issue than it needs to be (as far as she is concerned). In time, she'll learn how much you struggle with this as opposed to doing something "just for fun".
 
Three weeks of trouble walking, then 16 hours of urinary retention, followed by 8 hours of urinary incontinence were the precursors of a health crisis that landed me in the Neurological ICU for 6 weeks, ending in quadriplegia for a year. For the next year, whenever I wasn't in the hospital my wife had to deal with diapering me. In sickness and in health. After 18 months I was able to get out of the wheelchair, but there were still major neuromuscular issues, including incontinence. My wife did everything she could to remove the stigma of incontinence from our life. I miss her.
 
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