Our dog is a wonderful dog. I just have one bone to pick with her, so to speak. She seems to be compelled to stick her nose in people’s crotches or butts. Some visitors to our house don’t seem to be too bothered by that. But most don’t like it. So we need to get our dog to understand that it’s just rude to poke her nose in crotches and butts.
I’d also like to teach her to pee and poop on demand, but that’s a whole nother story.
Ben Franklin, an American printer and publisher, author, scientist and inventor, and diplomat, allegedly said, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
Like Ben Franklin suggested, I am an early to bed, early to rise kinda guy. Well, at least now that I’m in my 70s.
I usually am in bed by around 9:30 pm, but I typically spend the next hour-and-a-half to two hours on WordPress, mostly reading posts from bloggers I follow that I didn’t get a chance to read during the day and sometimes drafting posts that I will be publishing in the future.
As to the morning, my typical wake up time is between six and seven. If it’s closer to six, I may turn on my iPhone and check the overnights on WordPress. If it’s closer to seven, I’ll just get up then and start scanning WordPress with my first morning coffee.
Full disclosure: I usually have to get up to pee once or twice between the time I actually fall asleep and the time I wake up. I call that “Old Man’s Syndrome” and I wrote about it here.
So, early to bed and early to rise, like Ben Franklin suggested. Unfortunately, unlike Ben suggested, doing so has not made me healthy or wealthy or wise.
For this week’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday prompt, Linda G. Hill has given us “the last thing you emptied.” She wants us to think of the last thing we emptied or something we empty often and use it as our response to this prompt.
I consider you to be a friend so I’m going to tell you something that I haven’t told anyone else. I’m trusting you to keep this between us. Do we have a deal? Great.
I know I shared with you in this post a malady I suffer from, Old Man’s Syndrome (OMS). It’s an affliction that usually starts to manifest itself when men enter their sixties and begin to feel the aches, pains, and indignities that come with old age. It also means not being able to sleep through an entire night without having to get up to pee.
My OMS occurs virtually every night somewhere between 2 and 5 a.m. That’s when I wake up and have no option but to get out of bed to go pee. It doesn’t matter whether I stop drinking fluids right at dinnertime or continue to imbibe until just before bedtime. At some point during the night I have to take a leak.
But again, you know all that about me. And you also know that just over two months ago I fell off a ladder and broke my hip. I had to have an emergency partial hip replacement surgery and am recuperating from it as we speak.
But you didn’t know what I’m about to tell you, and I’m only telling you this because Linda asked me to. You see, I still need a walker to get around. And that includes getting from my bed to my bathroom when my nightly need to pee occurs. Sitting up, getting out of bed, reaching for my walker, and half rolling, half limping from bed to bathroom while half asleep, doing my business, and then half rolling, half limping, and getting back into bed is a bit of an ordeal.
In order to avoid that hassle — I can’t believe I’m actually telling you this — I keep a men’s urinal bottle like the one pictured below, at my bedside.
When I wake up and have to pee, rather than struggling with the walker to get up and go to the bathroom, I reach over and grab the men’s urinal bottle, strategically position it between my legs, position my thingie at the wide mouth of the bottle, and let it flow.
I know it sounds gross, but I’ll continue to do this until I can get out of bed and simply walk to the bathroom and pee without having to use my walker.
When it’s time to wake up in the morning, I get my walker, grab my men’s urinal bottle, and then half roll, half limp to the bathroom, and empty out the bottle of nocturnal piss into the toilet. Then, of course, I rinse out the bottle.
Remember, you promised not to tell any one, so let’s keep this confession between just the two of us, right?
Melanie is back with her Share Your World prompt and she’s asked some interesting questions today. Let’s she what she wants us to share this week.
If you could throw any kind of party, what would it be for? (Covid considerations are suspended for this question.)
The landscaping and hardscaping in our backyard is almost finished, so once it’s all done, I’d want to invite our family, friends, and neighbors over for a backyard cookout.
Is a picture worth a thousand words? Elaborate.
The depends upon the prompt. Some are limited to just 100 words. Some up to 200 words. A few allow up to 300 words. But none, as far as I know, are worth a thousand words.
Where IS Waldo?
Poor, misguided Waldo. Waldo was identified as a participant in the January 6th siege of the U.S. Capitol building by fanatic Trump supporters in their effort to stop the official certification of Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 presidential election. Since being identified by the FBI as one of those who breached the building, Waldo has gone into hiding at an undisclosed location. There is a worldwide manhunt going on to try to locate him and bring him to justice. The FBI is asking for our help and has posted a Twitter message with the hashtag #Where’sWaldo. A significant reward is being offered to the person or persons who can assist the FBI in locating where Waldo is.
What’s the best part of waking up?
I’m tempted to say “Folgers in your cup,” but have you ever actually tried to drink Folger’s coffee. Yuck.
Instead I’m going with the first pee right after you get out of bed. Oh what a relief it is.
Would you rather be covered in fur or covered in scales?
Okay, truth be told, I’m a rather hairy guy. Almost Neanderthal-like. And since I’m pretty much already covered in fur, fur it is and fur it must be.
Wouldn’t you like to expose your newer readers to some of you earlier posts that they might never have seen? Or remind your long term followers of posts that they might not remember? Each Friday I will publish a post I wrote on this exact date in a previous year.
How about you? Why don’t you reach back into your own archives and highlight a post that you wrote on this very date in a previous year? You can repost your Friday Flashback post on your blog and pingback to this post. Or you can just write a comment below with a link to the post you selected.
If you’ve been blogging for less than a year, go ahead and choose a post that you previously published on this day (the 19th) of any month within the past year and link to that post in a comment.
This was originally published on this blog on June 19, 2017.
I can’t tell you how relieved I was when I woke up this morning at seven and realized I had slept through the entire night without having to get up and go to the bathroom. How long has it been since that happened?
Back in the day I used to be a world-class sleeper. I could easily sleep for 10 to 12 hours at a clip, and sometimes even longer. And those were solid, deep, nothing-can-wake-me-up kinds of sleep. Total chaos could have been going on around me and I would be able to just sleep through it all.
Things are very different now, though. If I can manage four or five uninterrupted hours of sleep a night, I’m thrilled.
It’s not that I suffer from insomnia. I can usually fall asleep pretty quickly. My problem is that I can’t stay asleep. And the problem can be boiled down to one unfortunate malady. It’s OMS, or as it’s referred to in the New England Journal of Medicine (or would be if they actually did refer to it at all), “Old Man Syndrome.”
OMS is an affliction that usually starts to manifest itself when men enter their sixties and begin to suffer the aches, pains, and indignities that come with age. It is exacerbated by the fact that whatever they were good at when they were in their prime, they simply are not as good at it any more.
My OMS occurs virtually every night somewhere between 2 and 5 a.m. That’s when I wake up and have no option but to get out of bed to go pee. It doesn’t matter whether I stop drinking fluids right at dinnertime or continue to imbibe until just before bedtime.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, another name for Old Man Syndrome is nocturia. Urine normally decreases in amount and becomes more concentrated at night. That means most people can sleep at least 6 to 8 hours or longer without having to urinate. People who have nocturia, though, have to get up during the night to urinate. Because of this, they often have disrupted sleep cycles.
When I first stated experiencing OMS, I’d get up, go pee, get back into bed, and fall back to sleep almost immediately. Unfortunately, my OMS has gotten worse. Now, more often than not, after returning to the warmth and comfort of my bed, I am unable to fall back to sleep. Instead, my mind starts wandering and I toss and turn, sometimes for an hour or two. Sometimes I’m unable to fall back to sleep at all.
But even more disconcerting than this disrupted sleep cycle business is yet another devastating and demoralizing side effect of OMS.
Previously, in an attempt to minimize the sleep deprivation caused by OMS, I would get out of bed, make my way to the bathroom, turn on the light, grip my shlong, aim for the center of the toilet bowl, and let loose.
But then, after I began to lose my ability to rapidly fall back to sleep upon my return to bed, I thought a slight, scientifically based change in the routine might help. You see, according to WebMD, exposure to artificial light at night may reduce sleep quality by suppressing production of the hormone melatonin, which regulates the sleep-wake cycle.
Armed with the knowledge that turning on the bathroom light will suppress my production of sleep-inducing melatonin, I no longer turn on the bathroom light when I gotta go at night.
As you might imagine, the outcome of a man peeing while standing erect (the man, not the shlong) in the dark can be a bit messy. And so I now sit my butt down on the toilet seat and let loose.
Yes, it’s true. My OMS has evolved into PLAWS, or the dreaded Pee-Like-A-Woman-Syndrome.
Oh, the horror of it all!
This, That, and the Other 