Attitude and Incontinence: A Reunion Story
We were two women sitting in the worn but freshly scrubbed chairs of our old high school’s cafeteria, meeting each other at a reunion after a lapse of silent decades. Why the two of us had fallen out of touch was nothing more than the usual tale of life’s directions and demands overtaking youth. But present still was the rare, undeniable easy exchange that had always passed between the two of us, the chemistry that had made our teen friendship so stellar. A pang of remorse shot through me when I wondered why I hadn’t at least tried to find Sherry B. on FaceBook before this encounter. She was the same beautiful, feisty girl as ever, managing to laugh when others hesitated. Shamefully, I think my neglect had something to do with denial of her Multiple Sclerosis diagnosis that my mother told me had told me about just as I was graduating from college.
After our initial hugs and exclamations, Sherry and I showed each other pictures of our families and moved on to the subject of what our typical days looked like, with the last of the teenagers getting ready to fledge. I told her of my recent experience in elder care products and this is when she grabbed the opportunity to talk about the humiliation she first experienced with loss of bladder control. It was like I was her high school confidante all over again, that the decades between us had never transpired.
“Imagine trying to hide your stash of adult diapers from your teenage kids and their friends”, she said with a slight smile, “You know how teenagers are always looking to make a joke out of anything. I live in a small ranch with one bathroom. There’s not a lot of hiding places.” She drew a damp circle on her napkin with a coffee stirrer. “I can’t tell you the shame and fear I felt when I first realized that I had lost control of such a basic function. But you know, it was my kids who really helped me push beyond that. They really needed me to.”
“Flip on the TV now, pick up a magazine, and it seems the whole world is suddenly talking about adult diapers, pull-ups and pads. Now you, my old buddy, tell me that you make a living in the business. What’s happening?” she asked.
At that moment, my admiration for my dear long-neglected friend almost pushed me to tears. While listening to her talk, I had been imagining what it could possibly have been like for her, raising those three smiling, rowdy boys to young manhood as her photo album testified, never knowing next what wrench her MS would toss into the works. How dull and uncomplicated my life must have seemed to her in comparison. Instead she waited, genuinely wanting me to answer her question. So I indulged her with my usual professional breeze of statistics about the graying of America and the rising demand for adult diapers.
With a projected 147% increase of citizens 65 and older in the first half of this century, and with the promise of increased longevity, this means a lot more people have already begun to size up adult diapers than ever before. Incontinence can strike people from all walks of life and of all ages but it is the increase of an aging population that is bringing the topic to the public forefront. I assured Sherry that she was on the cutting edge of this wave because of her positive attitude and that she should not be shy about it. She should share her voice on the subject of incontinence. Start blogging or podcasting, getting the word out. I was on a roll, handing her PR assignments.
Then I saw that she had wilted like a cut flower during my spiel and I realized how foolish my little professional speech had been. Here was a woman who had travelled several hundred miles by air, shifting between canes and wheelchair, cheerfully coping with her incontinence, all in the hope of seeing for one afternoon, some familiar old faces from a time when she had less cares. She was not up to having any homework laid on her. What she wanted was a listening ear, plus a little help getting into the wheel chair so she could get over to the restroom. “Just wheel it to the door and dump the cripple in,” she instructed. I stood there, shocked at her words, but then glimpsed the teasing twist of her lips. Attitude is indeed everything.