Hello

My husband had his surgery just over 10 weeks ago and he was referred to a physiotherapist to help him with his bladder rehab. He was already doing the pelvic floor exercises before surgery, but she gave him lot's of helpful advice about how to do them. This included doing them when he was getting up from a seated position. He also downloaded the squeezy man app to his phone which reminds him to do the exercises.

He is now only getting out of bed 2 or 3 times at the most every night and his incontinence pants are dry. During the day he's managing to control thing's quite well but any sudden movement , coughing or passing wind causes some leakage. Compared to the first few weeks after his catheter was removed, this is a vast improvement. Back then I had to clean the floor and carpet a few times and he was going through several pairs of pants a day. Now one pair during the day and one at night is adequate.

He finds the pants better than the pads as they don't move and have elasticated legs to prevent leakage.

We get them online from a company called incontinence choice and they are cheaper and more effective than the supermarkets own brand. He was supplied with tena shields free by the NHS  but they're not absorbant enough yet. He sometimes pops one of them inside his pants for extra security if we're going out for a long time. Last Friday we were out for 10 hours and he had no leaks and didn't need to change. We were walking for several of those hours and had quite a few drinks.

If you want to know which pants he uses here is a screenshot of his last order. It looks like a lot of money but it works out cheaper to buy in bulk on subscription with just one postage charge.

I was like you at two months - standing up, gardening, manual type work was a nightmare. I had a sudden great improvement at 3 or 4 months. It coincided with me reducing pelvic floor exercises. I was doing them every hour but my SCN said that was too frequent and I reduced to 3 times a day. I don't know whether that was a contributing factor to my severe or my reduced leakage. In three weeks I will be 12 months post op. Leakage is now very very minimal no matter what I am doing and I am wearing just washable Tena incontinence pants to catch the odd dribble. For the first 8 or 9 months I was using pads inside the pants as belts and braces, which worked well for me. I think I only had one embarrassing moment, which fortunatley nobody noticed. Everyone is different but I have found this part of the journey very slow. The severe leakage standing up indoors and getting out of the car did make me very depressed. I started to use a coffee jar as a urine bottle just before I stood up and I found that made a vast difference to my acceptace to the problem. It gave me hope staright away that I could magage the situation. I then bought a cheap plastic urine bottle and used that up to probably around month 6 or 7 when I found I could control myself adequately to get to a toilet. My first stop after driving was a supermaket to use their facilities. After that I found I could last about an hour at that time. I would say keep positive, keep doing pelvic floor exrecises in moderation and find the best way you can to control the problem. You are not alone.