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Hello everyone. Our friend plf515 quipped that enuresis aka bedwetting may not be a disability. Well, here I am to make a stand for all the bedwetters of the world, young and old: if you think it is a small problem that goes away with time you are misinformed. In fact, it does not always disappear with maturity and is a problem that quite a few adults face. Well, some, not all of us. Bedwetting is rife and leads to emotional turmoil particularly with young people moving into adolescence and beyond. The one thing bedwetters have in common is a mortal fear of being found out, and are horrified when asked to sleep over at friends and/or sleep in a summer camp among other kids for fear of being exposed and made a joke of (see my own story below).
Follow me for my recollection of a young whippersnapper caught in a cavalcade of nocturnal nightmares. I have included a couple of excerpts from my book in which I purposely made light fun of this pesky habit as I am one of those who sees a silver lining in every dark cloud.
Terror strikes at any time during the night. You never know if you are wide awake or dreaming you are wide awake. And if you are wide awake, your best friend is a dry towel and a wooden floor. Believe me, I have spent half of my youthful nights sleeping out of my bed, hoping to defeat that demon. The other half I would try to stay awake, using all kind of tricks. Sadly, nothing worked. I was damaged goods.
In my room. l felt the sheets and my new pair of striped pajamas. Dry. Phew! I had woken up earlier, soaked to the marrow with sweet smelling urine. I had to get up at break of dawn, changed into new pajamas, pulled the sheets off the bed and walked to the ding-dong room with Youki to rinse the whole soggy mess in the tub, with cold water. On average, I would make these early trips to the bathtub three to four times a week, less in summer, for reasons that I could never hope to understand.
Over the years, Eloise had sent me to numerous physicians and specialists, to no avail. Even Mademoiselle Planchet, who was incapable of a generous emotion, had tested various schemes and stratagems, and for a while had devised variants on minor forms of torture including eucalyptus flavored suppositories and whole tumblers of cod liver oil before bedtime. My room gave off a curious scent of eucalyptus. If you were to stack a chair up on the commode and climbed it, standing up you'd raise your arm, and running your index finger under the plaster moldings, just below the skylight, it would come out sticky resulting from several years of forcing suppositories in extremely tight places. Like that old Greek guy, I was nobody's fool. Once I had a dream about suppositories. It involved Mademoiselle Planchet and a suppository as big as a magnum of champagne. You don't have to know any further.
Though the causes of nocturnal enuresis are many and diverse, mine was not a product of a neurological disorder. No, mine was universal, a classic 20th century case: father left mother after birth of my baby brother, and then mother promptly gave me away to an aunt. I grew up feeling abandoned, separated from my brother who went to live with our grandmother but gradually found happiness in my small world, thanks to my great-grandmother who took a shine to me and taught me how to laugh and take life as it comes.
Aunt Eloise, who was very fond of expensive vintage port as an aperitif, had read somewhere a few months ago that a glass of fortified wine taken prior to sleep had certain therapeutic properties with favorable results for chronic bed-wetters. True or not and whether it would alleviate my nocturnal pissing, I thought it far more palatable than the dreaded cod liver oil, and after a taste, consented to take a small amount every night. Well, the first four nights were a disaster -floodgates were flung open- and on the fifth night I had naively surmised that the dosage ought to be increased, and as the bottle was left on my writing desk, I ended up quaffing three or four glasses of the stuff and consequently endured my first hangover which had split my brains into thousands of warring particles. In turn, my face had gained a wonderfully bilious complexion for a whole weekend.
Two summers earlier, in a moment of quiet desperation, I had tried a novel device -poorly thought out, I must admit- which consisted of tying up the prepuce of my penis with a cotton string tightly, like a sausage, in the vain hope that it would bring an end to my purgatory (for those who are not circumcised, do not try this at home). That night, needless to say, I was fortunate enough to have had my Swiss knife (within reach) to cut off the string, thereby narrowly avoiding a self-inflicted castration as I had woken up in intense pain, in a poof of sweat. I had a recalcitrant bladder, unperturbed by shame and humiliation, with its own free will and wishes and there was precious little that I could do about it. Being somewhat incontinent did severely limit my ability to sleep in beds other than mine. I had become remarkably skilful at building up a repertory of crafty excuses when asked to slumber parties and the like which was not infrequent, being a popular young buck with interplanetary ambitions.
And then the inevitable happened, the dreaded exposition of my weakness, another moment of quiet desperation:
Last year I had managed to live through the worst day in my life.
Eloise did finally talk me into going to a summer camp, high in the lavender-scented hills of Provence. I was supposed to camp there for two weeks and roam like a wild Catholic boy during the day and sing along roundelays around the campfire at nights. Well, I had found myself in her Provencal paradise, billeted in one of the fifteen army canvas tents -thirty kids with missing front teeth per tent- and on the third morning (a wet run so far), my tent supervisor, a mentally defective man with a bovine affinity, had decided, with sparkling wit, to make a spectacle of my bladder's prowess and had the wet sheets stretched out on two poles outside for all to see, inviting below-the-belt sarcasm from the whippersnappers...and a well-aimed foot to his groin, from me. He did of course, make the cardinal mistake of having underestimated Fanfan Renaud, the plucky youth that may have had faulty plumbing but possessed a fearless heart -and a strong left kick!
Nowadays with the help of the mighty Google there are some useful links who will provide not only comfort but a few hints on combating enuresis with some efficacy. My own problem was devised by one of my uncles and solved in a monetary fashion, aged nearly thirteen: for every dry day my aunt would give me twenty centimes, and take the twenty centimes back each time bed sheets were soiled. Simple and to the point. I began to see my loot augment in size and dry bed sheets over a period of four or five months, during which I had acquired a girlfriend. Then the nightmares became history.
Waking in the middle of the night to change your child's sheets after a bedwetting episode is practically a rite of passage for parents. And it's more common than you think. "I call it the hidden problem of childhood," says Howard Bennett, MD, a pediatrician and author of Waking Up Dry: A Guide to Help Children Overcome Bedwetting. "Unlike asthma or allergies, it's just not talked about outside the house."
For a comprehensive look into the causes of bedwetting, here's a very useful link.