Does Electric Shock Cure Bed Wetting?

In my dream is a running stream that slips over and around smooth stones.

As it travels along it grows to river size  and picks up speed and crashes in to larger sharper rocks.

Large white caps appear as the water churns turbulently.

At this point, it’s course can not be altered as it heads for the sheer drop.

As the rushing river spills over the edge and cascades into the pool below…

I awake and realize, I have wet the bed again!

This was a common recurrence during my pre-adolescence and, OK some of my adolescence.

I was a DEEP sleeper, like the ocean deep.  Whoops another water reference.

My parents did not know what to do about it or how to fix it.

To make it worse, during my stint in second grade, I was afraid to go to the bathroom (Number 1) by myself.

I would sit in my chair and hold it until finally just wetting my pants right there in my wooden seat.

I remember standing on the side of the school building while my classmates would play at recess.

I was too embarrassed to join in with my wet pants.  No Billy Madison in my class to save me.

My teacher eventually had to send a note home to my parents.

I was removing the varnish from the chairs!

It might have been because of this fear, that my parents probably thought I was wetting the bed on purpose.

What a dilemma!

They tried all sorts of things that never worked.  I constantly peed in my bed.

I vividly remember my mom putting diapers on me before going to bed and I was not sleeping in a crib.

I remember watching a movie on TV, called “The Loneliest Runner”

The 13 year old John Curtis would run home after school everyday.

This was because his mother would hang his wet bed sheet out of his window.

He would have to get there and take it down before anyone from school would walk by his house.

He became so fast that eventually he became an Olympic marathon, gold medal winner.

I could relate to this story, but my parents didn’t do anything like that.

When I was about 4th or 5th grade, my parents paid for a machine that was the bed wetting cure.

It would condition me to wake up when I had to pee.

It had a large wire mesh rectangle and a teal rubber mat that was attached under the mesh, to keep my bed from getting wet.

The wire mesh was attached to a large black box.

The box had a toggle switch, a red lamp that would illuminate and also an alarm that would sound when any liquid hit the mesh.

The idea was to drink a bunch of Kool Aid.

Did I just say drink the Kool Aid?

Go to bed naked and wet the bed.

Cue Niagara Falls!

One drop of liquid and the crazy, loud annoying buzzer would go off with the red lamp staring at me saying,

“GO TO THE BATHROOM! ” 

This only took a few times and my body was conditioned or retrained to wake up, BEFORE I wet the bed.

Cured!

Where does electric shock come into the story?

I told my wife about this childhood situation and I don’t think I gave her all the details, or I mumbled them out.

She would probably say the latter.

However, she came home one day to gain some clarity on the story because, one of her salon clients was unsure that my parents would actually use shock therapy on a child to control bed wetting.

She had it all wrong.

She thought my parents paid to have the pee shocked out me!

This was of course not the case since there was no shock involved.

It was just an alarm…..

Wait a minute!  “You tell your clients that I peed the bed?!?!”

What embarrassing childhood situations have been revealed about you?