Kathryn Kassai - The Bathroom Key: Put an End to Incontinence

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them.

Galileo Galilei

As I turned the corner into the hotel bar, I recognized Julie immediately. We had been best friends in high school, but we hadnt seen each other in years. Tonight, we were rendezvousing with some of our old buddies for cocktails before heading over to the main ballroom for our ten-year high school reunion. I had been looking forward to this night for months. Julie and I had decided to come together, and our respective spouses were happy to be spared a night of small talk, not having attended our alma mater. Giggling together, we were as excited as two kids in a candy store.

The happy hour was lively, to say the least, as more old friends showed up to tell stories and reminisce. It was during one of these hilarious stories that I realized I was laughing so hard I was crying. The down side was that my laughter had caused a bit of leakage into my underwear. Luckily, being aware of my problem, I had worn a protective pad and had a spare tucked in my tiny clutch.

Soon, it was time to head to the ballroom. The band was already playing when our gang entered the large room, and before I knew it I was out on the dance floor grooving with my old friends. Thats when it hit again, another leak, but this one was bigger than the last. Hoping everything was okay, I danced a little more, but with every move another trickle dripped out. I fled the dance floor and rushed to the bathroom. My pad was soaked. I quickly changed it and hurried back to the ballroom. Dinner was being served, so I found my table.

While I enjoyed the dinner conversation, I tried not to laugh too hard for fear Id have another accident. After dinner my friends made their way back to the dance floor again. But I just sat and watched at the vacant table. Finally, an old boyfriend persuaded me to dance, but just like before, urine would dribble onto my pad with every step I took. Nervously, I waited for the song to end and excused myself, saying that I needed a drink of water at my table. I was not enjoying myself.

When I sat down, I realized I had an even bigger problem. I could feel that my pad was so completely saturated that urine was oozing out of it. Unfortunately, I was out of fresh pads. Ashamed, I spent the rest of the reunion on my feet, but off the dance floor. I had prepped for this night for months, with a new haircut and a new dress. I had lost five pounds, yet there I stood, feeling old and disappointed. To think, I was once crowned homecoming queen. I saw it like a headline: Former Homecoming Queen Needs Diaper to Dance at Reunion. I grimaced at my sad but true situation. I imagined what others would think if they knew of my secret condition.

Have you ever accidentally wet your pants? Like Erica, most women have. What may surprise you is how many vibrant, well-known women do it all the time. The TV anchorwoman wears adult diapers during her newscast. The New York Marathon runner has urine running down her leg and Olympic Gold Medalist Mary Lou Retton admits she leaks. Even Oscar-winning actress and mega star, Whoopi Goldberg, has publically broadcast her incontinence through an ad campaign, as well as on her popular TV show, The View. Following suit, reality TV star, Kris Kardashian Jenner, admits that she, too, suffers with incontinence.

Urinary incontinence (the unwanted leakage of urine) has hit epidemic proportions, though for most women, it remains a hidden problem. Thirty-four million Americans live with urinary incontinence. Even more staggering is that an estimated 200 million suffer from incontinence worldwide. Over fifty percent of all women will experience incontinence at some point in their lives. To put these numbers in perspective, consider the fact that skin cancer and breast cancer are the most common forms of cancer that afflict women, yet incontinence is twenty times more prevalent than breast cancer and skin cancer combined! We will teach you how to beat these odds.

The average incontinent woman waits a shocking eight years to report her condition to anyone, including her own physician. The worst part is that, left untreated, incontinence can worsen until the woman is forced to spend her final years in a nursing home. The number one reason for nursing home placement among women is not senility, not lack of mobility, but incontinence. If a woman is living with one of her children, and the house starts to smell because of her incontinence, that is often the last straw leading to nursing home placement. Most of us would rather avoid this separation from our loved ones and this totally preventable scenario. This is an unacceptable final outcome for a curable medical condition.

On the island of Borneo, in Malaysia, every female teenager is taught pelvic floor exercises in preparation for marriage. The incidence of urinary incontinence in Bornean females is 1:100 versus the Western worlds ratio of 1:3. In some African villages, a new mother can resume having sex only after she is able to give a tight vaginal squeeze around the finger of the tribal midwife. So, what do the women of Borneo and Africa know that we in the Western world do not? First, they understand the major role the pelvic floor plays in childbirth, supporting the internal organs, the sexual response, and continence. They also know that urinary incontinence is not a normal aftereffect of childbirth, menopause, or general aging.

While American teenage girls are learning how to shave their legs and download their phone photos to Facebook, the women of Africa and Borneo are learning a life lesson that will better serve their health for years to come. Our job in this book is to take the knowledge of these ancient cultures and modernize them for you through advanced physical therapy techniques.

It all starts with the pelvic floor. The pelvic floor muscles are located at the bottom (or floor) of your pelvis. They attach like a hammock from the underside of your pubic bone to your tailbone. If you are sitting as you read this book, you are sitting on your pelvic floor muscles right now. They are just under the skin, between your sit bones. In we provide illustrations of the pelvic floor muscles.

The pelvic floor muscles have two major roles in preventing incontinence. First, they function as the main sphincters that allow you to hold back urine (like tightening a faucet), yet they also allow you to urinate when you desire (like opening a faucet). Second, these important skeletal muscles support all of the abdominal organs, including the bladder. Skin alone is not strong enough to do it.

There are three openings that pass through the pelvic floor muscles in women: the urethra (for urination), the vagina (for sexual intercourse and the delivery of babies), and the rectum (for gas and bowel movements). Something strong, thick, and supportive is needed for all these important bodily functions, and the pelvic floor is designed for all these purposes.

Dr. Arnold Kegel gets credit for researching these core muscles back in the 1940s, as well as for bringing them into the limelight. Dr. Kegel, a gynecologist practicing in southern California, found that it was incredibly difficult to teach his female incontinent patients to locate and strengthen their hidden pelvic floor muscles correctly and effectively, when they couldnt see or feel them and no joints moved when they contracted them. To overcome this, he invented and patented a pressure-sensing biofeedback unit. Voila! With his biofeedback unit, he had great success in curing urinary incontinence, and this was the basis of his published research. Without biofeedback, he failed to cure incontinence, because his verbal instructions were simply not enough.