Every Cough, Every Bathroom Break

***Sorry, more graphic bodily function discussion ahead***

There are tactile reminders of what happened that simply can't be avoided.

I still have that damned cough.  And every time I cough, I feel it push through my entire abdomen and crotch.  I was already having some incontinence issues due to the weight of the girls on my bladder and just pushing everything in my body south.  I have already spent several weeks kind of preparing my body whenever I felt a cough coming on. 

Uh oh, here it comes, ok, tighten those pelvic muscles so I don't leak, and *cough* and ok, good, didn't leak that time.

And now I have the added tactile memory of coughing pushing out more than urine.  And I just desperately feel the need to hold everything in (through my crotch and abdomen) whenever a cough surfaces.  But there's nothing to hold in anymore.  And there's a weird desire to just let it all go and push all of my insides out because it just doesn't matter anymore.  But of course there's nothing there that can be pushed out.

And as unpleasant as it is, a person just can't avoid having bowel movements the rest of their lives.  Not exactly an optional bodily function.

I'm taking iron right now as well as a stool softener.  So my bowel really has no clue what to do.  The iron tends to have a side effect of constipation while the stool softener is fighting that side effect.  Now that a few days have passed and the softener has taken effect, sometimes it's really easy and it just flows out of me in a liquid. 

Other times it's solid and my body needs me to push.  So I sit on the toilet, frustrated, because I don't have the emotional ability to push.  The last time I actively tried to push out a bowel movement, I pushed out my girls instead. 

If anyone tries to say "don't think about it" "stop obsessing" "You're only punishing yourself by thinking about what happened", well, how does one think about anything else with these constant physical, unavoidable, tactile reminders?  At least once an hour, my body needs to either cough or poop and I'm mentally right back in that emergency room trying not to do either.