hi,
I am a woman from the Netherlands and I found this website and forum quite by accident when googling for product reviews a couple of days ago.
I have read a bit more now and I am quite impressed by the very good and factual information that you give! I am particularly happy about the statement in the primer that 'We will not be "politically correct" here' - somehow all that concealed talking that people do is making things only worse.
I am not new to incontinence or, specifically, enuresis / bed-wetting. I have never known anything else. However, compared to what I have read, my problem is not very severe even though it has had its impact on my life.
I have a form of episodic enuresis: it occurs every now and then that I cannot keep things dry at night.
This typically lasts for a few days only. It occurs a couple of times every year, usually around my period (though not every month). This suggests that there is some hormonal factor involved, but every medical tests has been inconclusive.
Next to enuresis, I also have inattentive ADD (ADHD-i) which is basically a developmental neurological condition. One of the urologists that I have seen told me that there is also a neurological component to my bedwetting problem. He explained it as that not all brain functions mature in the same degree in everyone, and in my case some of the wiring that is involved in "staying dry overnight" is a bit shaky. That does make some sense, because there are a couple of other ways in which I matured later than usual or not fully. Nothing apart from 'being a bit different', rather chaotic, very absent-minded and prone to excessive daydreaming, though
As a child, these bedwetting episodes have given the most trouble because of all the failed attempts of my parents to manage it. Of course I wasn't aware at the time what caused this problem, and being unable to find a cure and / or a cause was probably the worst part of it. It felt like a continuous failing. I remember very well the mixed feeling of relief and 'being a bit of a failure' that I had when they finally accepted that they couldn't find a solution but that it also wasn't because I didn't try hard enough or something like that.
After that (I was around 10 years old) they still looked into possibilities that seemed promising, and I have continued to do that myself. But I'm having ever more doubts if it is worth going through the medical mills time and again. After all, my problem is relatively easy to manage. I have been aware when there is a bedwetting episodes due almost from the beginning, because I can sort of feel it. As a child, I described it as a "buzzy feeling in my belly", as if it becomes hard to sense what is going on in there. An electronic analogy would be that there is "too much noise on the line" so that the signal gets lost. As long as I'm awake I can then usually still sense when I need to go to the washroom, but not when I am asleep.
Therefore I know up front if I need to take measures (wear a nighttime diaper).
(sorry, this is turning into quite a long story!)
The reason I was searching for product reviews is that I want to change from disposable products to reusable. That's because I have never been very happy with disposables, and also for environmental reasons.
I have used disposables since my parents accepted my bedwetting as something no-one could change at that time. I remember vaguely that, after a lot of frustration trying to cope with mattress covers and such, we tried using the regular kind of plastic pants & disposable diapers that my mother used for all of us as toddlers but supposedly the ones she could find turned out too small to fit a ten year old girl. After that I got some sort of large ugly greenish disposable diapers that came with a sort of netted elastic panties. My goodness, I hated those things. They were stuffy and lumpy and smelled horribly "medical" even when new, plus they did not even suffice all the time. Maybe that is even my worst memory in connection with all this: it was those disposables that, to my experience, turned me from a relatively carefree child into a patient.
As soon as I was old enough to have my own say I tried to find a better solution. Without success though: I remember asking at our pharmacy (in the Netherlands, that is where you can buy incontinence supplies) whether they had vinyl pants and diapers in my size. The lady who helped me looked at me as if I had asked for dried frog pills or something like that and she went on to explain to me that that was very old-fashioned and that nowadays, there were much better solutions - i.e. those disposables that I hated so much. But she was friendly enough and even looked through all the catalogues that they had, but without any success. It was all "disposable absorbent undergarments" advertised by friendly smiling "Mrs. Active Jane's" - with all due respect, not something that appeals a great deal to a 16 yr old girl.
That is why I can relate so well to that "political correctness" statement that I read here .. even back then I had the impression that for some reason, this whole area seemed to have been monopolised by the firm Niminy-Piminy whose only aspiration was to make the problem invisible; not to address it. It made me want to shout out something like
"Hey, I am not an embarrassing problem that can only be whispered about in clinical terms behind closed doors! I am a real flesh-and-blood girl who happens to wet her bed 
And I don't need discreet products, I need some bulky large DIAPERS that can hold a night's worth and a couple of indiscreetly large comfortable plastic pants and I don't care if it looks like what babies wear as long as it works!"
But of course I didn't, though I wish I had
I'm really relieved that I found written down what I have been thinking by myself all the time .. I thought I was the only one.
At one time I did find some vinyl pants, but they were no good at all. The plastic was stiff and the elastics pinchy and too narrow. It's been like this all the time .. sometimes I got the spirit and looked all over the place hoping to find something better but when I failed I just left it there again for a few years. But now things seem to have changed .. there seems to be more available than ever; maybe there is also more openness from the side of the people themselves. It looks like things are developing in a good way.
The only thing that I find confusing now is that there is so much available that it is hard to figure out what is good, and what not.
I hope that I can find some good advice here.
Thanks for reading this far .. it's been quite a stretch.
- Maria
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Well, time to go eat dinner, have a good rest of the week, and weekend! Puffy