Okay, this may be a TMI, so feel free to pass it by.  But it's been on my mind, and that's what this blog is for: getting things off my mind.

I was born with a birth defect, and among many other things, had no urinary sphincter.  So that meant I was incontinent.  They tried everything: probably ten operations, but nothing worked.  I wore diapers until I was 13.

When I was 13 they hit upon a surgical procedure that would take part of my lower intestine and turn it into a urinary bladder.  It's still hooked up to the butt, but it allowed me to have control over my urine for the first time ever, except there was some tiny tendency to leak a little if I slept very deeply. No big deal: I would stuff a towel or washcloth into my shorts at bedtime to catch what little dribble might sneak out.  It would be rare, but it happened.

Dealing with that was nothing like the ammonia burns I would get from wearing a diaper all day at school.  Or having to deal with diapers as a teenager.  It was no fun at all.

So you can imagine how liberating it was to not have to wear them, to be continent.  Amazing is too trivial a word to describe it.  But it was amazing to not have to worry about that.  I had to sit to pee, but then at least half the world has to sit to pee, and they seem to do just fine.  It could occasionally be awkward were I not with people I felt I could trust with that "secret," but compared to what it was like before?  It was nothing at all.

Well, dammit, one of the symptoms of the edema I was dealing with pre-op was some incontinence.  Not a great deal, but some.  (There was one epic event I will spare you, however.)

Now that they're irradiating that same tissue and pissing it off, some of the symptoms are returning, among them, some of the incontinence.

Well, fuck.  I thought I was done with that shit 40+ years ago, and here it is, again.  It's not constant like it was when I was a kid, but just a little here and there.  But annoying, dammit.  I did my time in diapers.  13 years is a long time to have to fuck around with diapers, and I had sort of gotten used to the idea that I wouldn't have to wear them anymore.

But shit happens.  (That, indeed, is a wry joke.)  God bless those nurses and aides at KU Med for keeping me clean.  I was, from time to time, a font of runny poo, and they graciously and tenderly kept me cleaned up.  Amazing young people to be that poised in the face of so much (literal) shit.

So, anyway, I'm annoyed.  It seems silly to be worried about incontinence when I have a cancer growing in my head; on the other hand, having a cancer in my head seems enough to worry about without having to worry about pissing (or worse) myself in public.

So there you go.

Funny how we go from being babies and having a set of needs, and then as life rolls around to the other end, many of those same needs return.  It's that old what walks on four legs, then two legs, then three legs riddle.

Is there a football game on today?