I don't know why I even see an OBGYN anymore. The birth control conversation is over, fertility is moot, and even yeast infections are a young woman's game. Now it's just a matter of waiting to wet my pants.
For the past 10 years, the primary purpose of my annual lady-parts checkup has been my doctor telling me that incontinence is in my future.
Every exam she asks me, in so many words, if I'm peeing my pants yet. I would think she was just checking a box by asking the standard questions, but she asks me during my exam. While she's looking at the parts of my body that have thus far done a stellar job of keeping everything where it's supposed to be.
As if lying on a table wearing a paper gown with my knee socks in stirrups wasn't humiliating enough, she's got to conjure up the least ladylike thing short of a colostomy bag.
"Hmmm," she says.
"What? What do you see? What's happening down there?"
"Oh nothing," she says, and then pauses. "Do you have any problem with incontinence?
"Well I will now," I snap. I'm not saying I'm highly suggestible, but one time my sister asked me if I was getting chin hairs yet and the second I put the period on the sentence "No" I sprouted a big black one.
"No, it's fine, really," my doctor continued. "It's just that when you get older, the muscles that normally hold up your bladder just kind of loosen up and in some women the bladder can - are you sure you don't have incontinence problems?" I could sense she was getting ready to define incontinence for me. I know what it means. But I still don't have it. Yet.
I know a lot of women my age who do have varying severities of pants wetting. They're very discreet and no one will admit it (except for me - you can expect the blogosphere to light up when I pee my pants for the first time without immaturity being involved), but when was the last time you saw a woman 55 or older jumping rope? Or sneezing? Or coughing? Think about it.
Knowing that this is what my (possibly near) future looks like, I decided to look into it. I ruled out everything with the phrase bladder sling in it, because the only time you ever hear those two words together is on daytime TV ads for medical malpractice attorneys. Just the words reek of paperwork and boring court proceedings. And if your case ever goes to an actual trial, can you imagine the number of bathroom breaks they have to give those poor women whose bladder slings failed? It could drag out for months.
And then Angela, a woman I know, told me about her experience with Impressa, a bladder control tampon (suggested slogan "Made for Women Only for Women. Because Women Have the Real Estate For It"). The idea is to wear an uncomfortably large tampon where a tampon's supposed to go, so that it pushes closed where urine might leak out. The key is to get the right size, which is where the humiliation comes in.
Angela said she had to watch a video on how to determine which size she needed. The Impressa copywriters are careful not to say that some women will need an "Extra Large" or a "Double Wide." Instead they discreetly have sizes 1, 2 and 3.
"Finding the right size has nothing to do with the amount you leak or the size of your jeans - it's about finding your best internal fit," Impressa tells the ladies. In other words, you might boast a dress size 0, be a gosh darn underwear model, and have no chin hairs whatsoever, but your bladder control tampon might be on the larger size. Life can be so wonderfully fair at times.
Impressa sends you a size test kit, where you have to try all three sizes. You know you've reached the right fit when you're so uncomfortable you walk as if you've been riding a horse for 10 hours.
Now that we've got Impressa and we know how to get the right fit, you'll see more women my age coughing, sneezing, laughing, jumping rope and walking funny.
