I hate getting sick.

The week before Memorial Day weekend, I came down with a nasty end-of-spring head cold that kept me home from work a couple of days.  It also put me back into incontinence pads.

Heavy coughing certainly increased the likelihood that I would have stress incontinence episodes, so I started wearing pads as insurance.  I’m glad that I did, because several times they were definitely needed.  I will admit, however, that I did better than I expected in many cases, and I attribute that to my recent weight loss.

The one thing that I’ve had difficulty controlling is stress incontinence while I’m standing.  If I’m standing or walking when I sneeze or cough, there’s a much greater likelihood of leakage, no matter how hard I try to control my pelvic floor muscles.  That’s where the pads came in really handy.

The unfortunate thing with this head cold is that, even though the worst of it lasted only a couple of days, the nagging cough lingered for a good week and a half after.  Ugh.

The moral of this story: Keep pads on hand for those unexpected times when you may need them.

This recent Prostate Cancer Foundation article, Excess Weight Linked to Worse Prostate Cancer Diagnosis, reinforces my will to keep losing weight.  Sure, it may be a case of me closing the barn door after the horses have escaped, but getting to a healthy weight can only be a good thing in the long run for a whole host of reasons.