Well Wensley, (you can tell I have gotten to an age where one's mind goes gaga - where do you think I got my moniker from? - as I have been busily typing you as newbie...never mind, I'm sure you know what I meant!)
I am delighted if I have been even the tiniest source of encouragement.
Here is what I think of "experts" (with apologies to the experts who started this excellent bladder matters website! thank you!) - there are those who have personal experience of one's condition and there are those who can merely empathise because of having studied the condition. The latter can only go on the data available and for incontinence of the types of which we are now beginning to speak, I suspect that historical data is thin on the ground. After all we can all relate to the embarrassment about speaking out so doubtless thousands of women (especially childbearing ones who possibly make up the majority in our category) suffered in silence in past times.
From my own experience I can relate to the "professional advice" in an adaptive manner. I ask myself how relevant does it feel that the expectations offered are particular to my condition. I may have said before but to give you an example of what I mean: my gynaecologist thought that his internal investigations, the results of the urological torture tests (sorry they are dreadfully unpleasant and I wish I had had a better idea of what to expect because then i might have managed to be a bit less hysterical and a bit more stoical) and the book-knowledge he had indicated that I had both urge and stress incontinence.
The more I read, the more I spoke to other sufferers and, in particular, having come across a delightfully upfront booklet on incontinence written by a specialist nurse from Australia (where they tend to call spades spades), the more I decided that urge incontinence is far more often an emotional problem than a physical one. Whoa! Before all you urgers out there descend on me for trivialising your problems - hear me out....
If for whatever reason (and they could be physical ones) , the bladder's sphincter muscles (or whatever other mechanisms, nerves or whatever...my physiology knowledge isn't all that deep) LEARN to respond to the very first hints of impending fullness and we all rush to the loo, then next time, like a toddler who has just discovered how to manipulate mummy and daddy, those same indicators will send a message to the brain to say "hey come on, if you don't let me empty I'll pee all over the floor!" Thus starts a sort of cycle of strictly speaking "inappropriate" responses from the brain.
It's telling that urgers may have to release the instant they get indoors (whether their bladder is actually full or not) because home is where we can mostly put away our anxieties. And we also spend a lot pof anxious time checking out the nearest loos when we are out.
Now, since I have solved my definitely physical problem of stress incontinence (ie. overstretched muscles which don't manage to support my brain's signals to hold on) by having everything hoisted up more tightly with the tape, I have lost all the ANXIETY and my supposed urge incontinence has vanished!
Hence being able to have hugely longer periods between bladder emptying. My "bladder retraining"- which pre-op' was slow and in tiny increments (and that aforementioned Australian continence nurse had said sometimes it takes months or even years of efforts to overcome) - has sort of fallen into place overnight. That is without the anxiety my brain simply ignores any signals until my bladder has become pretty nearly full (much nearer to 500ml than the less than 200ml I had managed each time before). Even if the urge problem hadn't vanished (or so I reasoned) I could be calmer about facing the need to retrain myself.
So what am I saying here?
Well I'm not sure how much help it is to people who ONLY have urge incontinence except that the Aussie nurse seemed certain that retraining one's brain/bladder co-ordination IS possible, but for those of you out there who have evidence of flabby bits leading to leakage under stress, I'd say go ahead and get the latter sorted and then worry about the other bit when you see how improved you are.
Sorry this is a long post but I noticed that there have been several hundred of people reading this who are "guests" so I suspect there are a lot of women out there who don't even want to expose themselves to other sufferers. I think I'm turning into a bit of a continence evangelist!