Doctor, I Have A Wee Problem!

In this witty, unflinching excerpt from her new book Luce Brett tells the story of how she coped with becoming incontinent after the birth of her first child

- Luce Brett

It's often a dirty secret, a scourge that can turn every cough, laugh or sudden movement into disaster.

For many women, incontinence is a shame to be suffered in silence, a “down-there” problem they can’t bear to talk about. Yet it shouldn’t be a taboo – and the author of a new book is hoping to dispel the distress around it.

PMSL Or How I Literally Pissed Myself Laughing by British writer Luce Brett is a candid memoir of how her body changed after childbirth into something that could no longer be trusted.

Incontinence is an issue that can lead to depression and the breakdown of marriages but there is help out there, Luce says. And hope.

LIKE many women, before motherhood incontinence was something I was largely ignorant about.

As it happened I walked out of the maternity ward in the summer of 2007, at the ripe old age of 30, with a collection of incontinence issues that would unfold, over the next decade, into an epic drama.

It required countless internal examinations, endless appointments, two surgical procedures and an incalculable amount of self-blame and self-hatred.

At my six-week postnatal check, I blurt it out: ‘I just . . . leak. If I laugh or try to climb the stairs. Sometimes it starts when I’m breastfeeding. I can’t stop it. And nothing’s in the right place anymore.’

When my doctor asks if anything else makes it happen, I think of my first post-birth shag with my lovely husband, Robin. On the landing, with plenty of pillows and limited romance, our bedroom dominated by the briefly sleeping infant.

‘Everything makes me wet myself,’ I say in a tinny, defiant voice.