Eminess* Strikes Again

 

*my name for my recently diagnosed Multiple Sclerosis (MS)

 

As a general rule, Americans don’t much appreciate conversations about bodily functions.  Have you noticed?  I know I don’t…or didn’t.

I’ll never forget the first time I saw a commercial peddling a medication for the dreaded erectile dysfunction.  I was suitably shocked for a woman raised in the habitual denial environment of parochial school.  Bedroom talk in public? Never!

Those commercials proliferated vigorously.  After awhile they were so de rigor I started wondering why nobody had invented a similar remedy for married women’s erroneously notorious lack of interest in intimacy.  Ah, but let’s save that for another blog post.

Anyway, having become accustomed to Big Pharma commercials by then, I nearly cracked a rib laughing when I first saw the commercial featuring these “people”:

The ad is for Vesicare, a drug created to address the symptoms of an overactive bladder (OAB).  The use of plumbing pipes to intimate the embarrassing and inconvenient prospect of one’s bladder “leaking” was both stupid and ingenious.

This ad campaign preceded my MS diagnosis by around four years.  I remember wondering silently if there really were that many people walking around freaked out about the possibility of failing to hold their water, so to speak.  And I remember feeling very very sad for them.

I think I was one of those kids Sigmund Freud described who were somehow traumatized by their toilet training.  I have always been obsessed with the avoidance of that so-called urgency those OAB drugs treat.  To this day, I never leave the house without at least attempting to empty my bladder.

Which brings me to the present.

I don’t know how I missed this, but it turns out that 80% of people with MS develop bladder issues.  Just like all my other symptoms, the reason for what I called an irritable and unpredictable urinary tract went undiagnosed for decades.  When I concluded that coffee of any amount would significantly increase my trips to the loo, I stopped drinking it.  When I realized that even caffeine-free Diet Cokes intensified an intermittent sensation of “having to go” immediately after leaving the restroom, I stopped drinking that, too.  In fact, I stopped drinking everything except skim milk and water.

One of the first questions my neurologist asked when I finally found myself in consultation for a boatload of seemingly disconnected issues was “have you had any problems with your bladder?”  Um… well, yes, I have.

I’m sure you can imagine my horror when one morning, after a very rare night of sleeping straight through without waking to stagger into the bathroom two or three times, I got out of bed and immediately became drenched in urine. I remember practically shouting, “No. No. Ohhhhh, nooooo.”

It happened the next morning, too.  I cried and vowed never to leave the house again.

The doctor had given me a prescription to treat my almost daily tension headaches.  Although I had been taking that drug off and on for other reasons, I had never taken a dosage as high as the one the neurologist prescribed.  Suspecting it was the culprit, I Googled the side effects of the drug and, sure enough, there in black and white were the words “urinary incontinence.”  Aha!

I stopped taking that drug that day, just to see.  Sure enough, although I did wake up several times to urinate during the night, I didn’t spring a leak upon leaving my bed in the morning.  Verdict: It was the drug.

So, Dr. Neurologist reduced the dosage by more than half.  And, aside from the truly exasperating dry mouth it causes, I was able to wake up during the night to tend to my increasingly annoying bladder, thus eliminating the totally uncontrollable and humiliating gush upon rising in the morning… until yesterday.

There is a new questionable TV commercial that has emerged most recently:

Yep. They come in pink and blue.