Wet Pants
By Rick Rader, MD, Editor-in-Chief

Timing is everything.

I just returned from a conference to find this email ditty.

Wet Pants (Anonymous) Come with me to a third grade classroom… There is a nine-year-old kid sitting at his desk and all of a sudden, there is a puddle between his feet and the front of his pants are wet. He thinks his heart is going to stop because he cannot possibly imagine how this has happened. It’s never happened before, and he knows that when the boys find out he will never hear the end of it. When the girls find out, they’ll never speak to him again as long as he lives.

The boy believes his heart is going to stop; he puts his head down and prays this prayer, ‘Dear God, this is an emergency! I need help now! Five minutes from now I’m dead meat.’

He looks up from his prayer and here comes the teacher with a look in her eyes that says he has been discovered.

As the teacher is walking toward him, a class mate named Susie is carrying a goldfish bowl that is filled with water. Susie trips in front of the teacher and inexplicably dumps the bowl of water in the boy’s lap.

The boy pretends to be angry, but all the while is saying to himself, ‘Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Lord!’

Now all of a sudden, instead of being the object of ridicule, the boy is the object of sympathy. The teacher rushes him downstairs and gives him gym shorts to put on while his pants dry out. All the other children are on their hands and knees cleaning up around his desk. The sympathy is wonderful. But as life would have it, the ridicule that should have been his has been transferred to someone else—Susie.

She tries to help, but they tell her to get out. ‘You’ve done enough, you klutz!’ Finally, at the end of the day, as they are waiting for the bus, the boy walks over to Susie and whispers, ‘You did that on purpose, didn’t you?’ Susie whispers back, ‘I wet my pants once too.’

While you can’t dispute the touching and warm sentiment, I would normally have smiled and hit delete; after all, I get dozens of these Hallmark genre blurbs a week. But timing is everything.

The conference I attended was no ordinary  conference (most of the conferences I go to are not ordinary, there are few “ordinaries” in the world of developmental disabilities), but this was beyond the “unordinary” conferences I attend and participate in. This was the Innovating for Continence Conference, a novel three day conference that is held every two years and attracts a diverse group of people somehow connected to an interest in “continence” in all its forms and configurations. The conference is sponsored and conducted by The Simon Foundation. Founded in 1982 by its President Cheryl Gartley, The Simon Foundation began “in the dark ages of incontinence— a period when the stigma surrounding incontinence made this symptom so taboo that there were no overhead signs in retail aisles announcing incontinence products, no books on the subject in libraries, no television commercials advertising medications or absorbent products, and a complete absence of articles in major magazines or newspapers. In the midst of the dearth of information and help The Simon Foundation began their mission to bring the topic of incontinence into the open, remove the stigma surrounding incontinence, and provide help and hope to individuals with incontinence, their families, and the professionals who provide their care.”Instrumental in creating the conference is Dr. Alan Cottenden, who is the University College London’s Professor of Incontinence Technology.

This conference brings together an amalgam of people that would probably never gather if it wasn’t for their interest in addressing the biopsychosocial issues regarding loss of bladder and sphincter control. Individuals and their families dealing daily with incontinence, physicians, nurses, engineers, industry leaders, policy makers an researchers are drawn to thinking, innovating and addressing solutions to this debilitating and game changing condition that has stigmatized individuals since before people uncontrollably soiled their togas. Between the lectures on “hydrocolloid external continence devices,” “on-body electrochemical sensing” and “smart polymer textiles” were heartfelt vignettes by people with incontinence and how the condition changed their lives, their sense of self and their human connectivity. The Innovating for Continence Conference serves as a model for any disabling disorder, condition or disability that requires a group to address the myriad issues that disabling conditions demand.

Timing is everything. A common thought that has special meaning for those forced to deal with dictatorial bladders and sphincters.

Rick Rader, MD, Editor-in-Chief
Director, Morton J. Kent
Habilitation Center
Orange Grove Center, Chattanooga, TN