This educational resource was sponsored by Poise, a Kimberly-Clark brand.
As told to Nicole Audrey Spector
I am small in stature, but you wouldn’t guess I’m a petite woman based solely on my sneeze, which sounds like the war cry of a goose. And observers don’t just hear one sneeze, they encounter at least a few, one after another. A veritable herd.
My mother has the same loud sneeze, and as a child I made fun of it, not so much the sound of the candelabra that accompanied it. achoobut the side effects of their sneezes.
Every time my mother sneezed, she peed on herself. It was no secret.
“Oh my God, I peed myself!” he would scream and run to the bathroom laughing. The same thing happened to him when he had a coughing fit. “I peed myself!”
She never seemed to be ashamed, but I was ashamed of her.
Now, at 41, I can relate to what my mother has been going through.
When I sneeze or cough, I often pee a little. Sometimes more than a little, if I already have the urge to go.
Leaking urine is a fairly new issue for me. It started after I gave birth to my son, Timothy, in 2022. It was the first time I carried a pregnancy to term and the first time I had to suction a baby with a head in the 100th percentile of the birth canal, after said head became stuck.
After I had Timothy, it took me a couple of days to pee on my own. The first day, I had a catheter. The second day, I went to the bathroom by myself and sat on the toilet for what seemed like a million minutes, feeling nothing beyond my belly button. It was important, a nurse said, that I pee on my own, without the catheter. When I finally did, my nurse applauded me. I applauded, even though I couldn’t really feel the urine coming out and I certainly couldn’t turn the stream on and off like I had before.
When I was discharged from the hospital after the usual 48 hours, I was sent home with a stash of hospital-provided mesh underwear and pads, apparently designed for elephants.
I thought pads were just there to catch the discharge that leaked out in the early days postpartum, but it turned out they were also catching urine, as revealed by many too-late and too-messy bathroom trips.
“It’s normal to have some urinary incontinence after a vaginal birth,” my OB/GYN told me in an email, after I contacted her about two weeks later. I had emailed her to ask if it was normal for me to have urinary leakage.
I told my friend Sophie, a yoga teacher who does great work with pregnant and postpartum women, about bladder leakage.
She told me I probably had a pelvic floor injury and told me to go to a pelvic floor therapist “as soon as possible” to address the problem.
Instead of consulting a pelvic floor therapist, as advised, I did nothing.
Looking back, I think I was just too tired to believe anything was wrong or unusual. In fact, I didn’t feel like “me.” I felt like an alien had taken up residence in my body. I was a mess, and I didn’t want to make things any more complicated than they already were by bringing a certified expert into the mix to say, “What a mess!”
That was almost two years ago. The urine leakage has decreased compared to what I was experiencing right after giving birth, but it hasn’t gone away. Not at all. What has gone away is my surprise about it. I’ve gotten used to peeing a little when I sneeze, cough, or even sometimes laugh.
While I never leak to the point of being completely saturated, I do drool, and that is enough to motivate me to carry a spare pair of underwear in my bag when I go out. If I do leak, I usually throw away the dirty pair and put on a new one.
It’s not an ideal solution (it’s bad for both the planet and my wallet), but I haven’t found anything better yet. Unlike my mother, I don’t find it particularly funny to pee on myself. It’s embarrassing, especially when I’m in public.
And I still wonder: Is this normal?
I’ve spoken to other moms who have had vaginal births and they all say they can relate to this. They also tend to pee a little when they sneeze, cough, or laugh a lot. Plus, I recently learned that up to 1 in 2 women suffer from urinary incontinence.
Does the fact that urine leakage is so common among women make it “normal”? Is there anything I can do to make it stop? I have tried Kegel exercises, following advice from Sophie and many mother blogs, but I have no idea if I am doing them correctly and I have yet to notice any difference.
I’ve reached a critical point: I need to know if bladder control is just a way of life for women like me. Right now, I’m looking for a pelvic floor therapist, and I honestly wish I had done it sooner.
In the meantime, I’m going to explore products like pads or disposable underwear to make urinary incontinence less bothersome. Throwing your underwear in the trash in restaurant bathrooms isn’t a good long-term solution, and neither is feeling bad about myself all the time.
*Names have been changed for privacy reasons.
Resources
National Continence Association
This educational resource was sponsored by Poise, a Kimberly Clark brand.
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