At Last, A Cure For Adult Onset Panty Despoilment

I get my most reliable medical information from the full-page spreads in the newspaper that say "Paid Advertisement" at the top. You should never trust an advertisement that's purchased on credit. This recent one caught my eye:

Pills May Replace Diapers And Padded Underwear At Stores

This is an exciting development, although I'd think it would have to be a really large, spongey pill. The pill in question is called UriVarx and according to the ad it "contains ingredients that keeps the bladder from releasing voluntarily." There's no further explanation, so I assume the pill, with its ingredients, gets lodged in the exit hole of the bladder. I do have some limited acquaintance with Adult Onset Panty Despoilment and despite the difficulties the condition presents, I would prefer--call me a urinary libertarian--to maintain my bladder's ability to release voluntarily. But corking the sucker up altogether might be an attractive option in the short run.

According to WebMD, the main symptom of urinary incontinence is involuntary release of urine from the bladder. (Similarly, nausea is characterized by a barfy feeling.) According to the proprietor of the UriVarx ad, the unfortunately named Dr. Damaj, your bladder muscles weaken as you age. This doesn't surprise me in the least. Judging from the condition of the muscles on the outside of me, I suspect everything inside is flapping away in there like hung laundry.

Many UriVarx users report that their bladders have never been stronger. Some of them are positively ripped. And "adult pads and diapers are no longer a worry." This is a relief! You get a closet full of those and you never know when they're going to turn on you. Marie L. of Danbury, CT exults that thanks to UriVarx, she is no longer living in constant fear of finding a bathroom. This is a serious concern. Those suckers are everywhere; there's no getting away from them.

Furthermore, "research shows that as we get older, the muscles which surround the bladder weaken. This is caused by hormonal changes in the body that causes the muscles to weaken." This brings to mind several questions:

(1) Are the muscles that surround the bladder supposed to be intimidating?

(2) Are there any good money in pharmaceutical advertisement editing?

Coincidentally, another full-page ad two pages later also featured the pioneering work of Dr. Damaj. "Apeaz" (pronounced either Appease or Ape-Ass) is an arthritis painkilling cream. Its "powerful effect is created by the cream's active ingredient, a special medical compound." Even better, every container of Apeaz comes with a breakthrough pill named ArthriVarx, which also contains special compounds.

ArthriVarx is probably related to UriVarx. I'm holding out for AardiVarx, which has been shown to cure ants. Or its predecessor ArchaeoVarx, with its key stomping ingredients and tiny little arms. You rub it on Jurassic.

There I Go Again

Here's something I never used to do: feel a sneeze coming on, brace myself, cross my legs, let fly, and say "oh shit." I used to just sneeze.

The first time you pee a little when you sneeze, it's startling. What happened there? you say. You go into the bathroom to find out, and sure enough, what you thought had happened actually happened. When you've gone a good fifty years without accidentally peeing, you sort of take things for granted. Then it happens again. After about a year of this you have to conclude that a new reality is in place. It may not be one you had in mind. You might have thought "some day I will retire, and I will be able to maintain a lovely garden and learn to cook and maybe write a little," but leaking urine for no reason? Never made the bucket list.

It's not a lot of pee. It's just a dot, really, but it's concerning. You got your pee volume on the y-axis, and your age on the x-axis, this is not a graph you really want to plot.

In my case, the culprit was a new subdivision of fibroid tumors in my abdomen. You don't schedule those, either, but there you go. There's usually nothing particularly dire about fibroids, but I'm against them. If anything is just going to start growing for no reason, I don't see why it can't give me more height or longer fingers. Anyway, a posse of them is sitting on my bladder, according to my doctor, who assures me they are a threat to nothing but my underwear.

The doctor tells you to start doing Kegel exercises, as though you had just fallen off the turnip truck and hadn't read a single women's magazine ever when you just spent a couple hours in the waiting room of a gynecology office. Kegels are easy. You just squeeze the muscle you have used all your life to stop yourself from peeing. Those of us with a major beer habit know it intimately. You squeeze and release it, and then you repeat. A hundred times a day--says my doctor--in sets of ten. You can do it all day long. You can do it without anyone knowing! Ha ha! What a thrill it is to look right at someone and think "you believe I am listening to you, but really I am strengthening my pelvic floor." If you don't have a life.

I object on principle. Since I've been potty-trained, I never had to do exercises to keep from wetting myself, and I don't think I should have to start now. Of course, I never used to have to tell my skin to firm up, either. My skin used to hug me like it was in love, and now it just slouches around like the cat's pajamas. Even the skin on my elbow just yawns and says "if you need me, I'll be somewhere around here," without getting real specific about it. I didn't tell my skin it was off duty. It just decided "to hell with it" on its own. And frankly, I don't think I have the moral standing to order my skin around. I just lug it around, I'm not the boss.

So that's what all the internal skin is doing too. It's been holding up all these years, and then it retires, and says to itself, what do I care if somebody's underwear gets a little soiled? I don't care. I'm off duty. That's someone else's problem. Oh, and send down some beer.

All right, fine. Now I'm supposed to exercise muscles nobody will ever see. It's one thing to climb mountains and get quadriceps so mighty you need to floss above your kneecaps. That's sort of gratifying, plus you aren't doing it just for drill. You're seeing mountains. It's an entirely different matter to go through a bunch of exercises for the distant reward of maybe not soiling yourself in public. Not that that isn't fervently to be desired--but it does not have immediacy, reward-wise. Kegels advocates tell you that you can do it while you're parked at a stop light. Waiting in line at a grocery store. Anywhere. And they're right.

My problem is that after I do about ten Kegels, my entire face starts squinting. I don't know what relationship my face has with my bladder gasket, but all of a sudden I'm gaping like an insect, mouth slotted down at the corners, eyes bugged out, ears laid back. It's an awkward look, socially. It worries people. Our bodies probably came with a manual like everything else, but most of us don't bother consulting it until we start getting the error messages, and I'm no different. So I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty confident you're not supposed to be able to blink your whole face with your crotch.

But at least I know how to do them. It's right there in the women's magazines. I also know the most flattering swimsuit style for my body type. But no one wants to let me in the pool.