subject: How a Bladder Diary Can Help You Deal With Incontinence [print this page] How a Bladder Diary Can Help You Deal With Incontinence
You may be wondering what a bladder diary is and what purpose does it serve. Essentially, it is a diary that you would keep that keeps track of what is happening with your bladder on a daily basis. Doctors recommend that you maintain a bladder diary that you update on a daily basis, when you first begin to experience this condition. Over the course of time, you may be able to start seeing patterns emerge, that correlate with your eating and drinking habits, for example. This will help you doctor determine whether or not you need to make any changes to your daily eating or drinking habits to help you better keep your incontinence problems in check. Therefore, it might be a smart decision to start maintaining a bladder diary, if you feel that you might be developing incontinence
There are a number of sample bladder diaries online. How frequently you update your diary depends on how often you observe any problems. This could be hourly, three times a day, twice a day, or nightly, depending on your particular circumstances. Each entry should contain the time of day, what you drank or ate, and how much quantity, any accidents you encountered, how you felt, what you were doing at the time, and the number of pads that you soiled on that particular day.
Here are a few things to consider as you begin keeping records in your bladder diary:
Time Your bladder diary could cover a span of time of as few as 3 days, but the longer the better. A week may be ideal.
Quantity Estimating the quantity of urine can be categorized in terms of small, medium, or large amounts. If your doctor requests you to keep more precise measurements than he may ask you to install a pan under the toilet rim that can collect the urine and measure it.
Pads It is very important to note down how often you are having to change your absorbent pads or pants.
General State of Well Being Also noteworthy in your bladder diary is your overall state of health throughout each day. Note down any symptoms of any health issues you may be feeling, such as headache, fever, cramping, nausea, or anything else. This will help your doctor better diagnose the root cause of your incontinence.
Female Menstrual Cycle It is not recommended that you start your bladder diary during your monthly menstrual period. It would not be very easy to get a clear idea of how many pads you needed to change due to incontinence versus for your period. You can wait until the day after your menstrual cycle is finished and mark that as the first day of your bladder diary.
Maintaining a bladder diary can go a long way in helping your doctor determine the root cause of your incontinence. The more detailed and thorough your bladder diary is, the more accurate will be your doctor's diagnosis, and the more effective will be the prescribed treatment.
