When my dad began to get elderly and run down, I noticed that he didn’t seem to have the bladder control problems that so many elderly do.  I never really thought to ask why as he went through a stroke and then recuperation and then a relapse again.  Toward the end, he definitely was wearing one sort of incontinence device or another, but up to that point he was oddly free of all of that.

We’d moved him out to a place in Scottsdale to be near to my sister, and as I look back on it now maybe that had a little to do with it.  The elderly are notoriously bad at drinking water properly.  I know that so many of them are seriously dehydrated anyway, and I bet the desert air didn’t help any.  But he was also a smoker, too, and doesn’t that dehydrate you even more?  I’m not sure about that, and I certainly did support that the home allowed their patients to smoke outside, seeing as how that entire generation was full of rabid smokers.  Probably, though, it was a combination of all of this coupled with the fact that he was a male.  Don’t men have fewer bladder control problems than women?

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