Patient Story ID: 1413392

Background

I’m happy to say that I’m a prostate cancer survivor, and so I want to share my abbreviated story, which is substantially different than that of most patients. In 2010, at the age of 64, I was diagnosed with Gleason score 6 prostate cancer. Given my otherwise good health and genetics, my preferred treatment was a prostatectomy. The surgery effectively treated my cancer. However, my side effects included chronic, moderate incontinence, and likewise manageable erectile dysfunction. With limited stress incontinence during any given day, I would rely on 2 or 3 medium absorbent liners to manage my leakage. The use of multiple liners started to impair my quality of life.

Relax for Men™ (with spacers) for managing male incontinence.

Approach

I became determined to find a solution to my urinary incontinence, a very common, debilitating (and perhaps underappreciated) problem. My goal was to live a normal life—which to me, meant no more than one liner per day—without additional surgery. I found the available incontinence products or treatments were all unsatisfactory and deficient in different ways.

I joined various patient support groups to share, listen, and learn from others experiencing this same problem. I found teenagers skipping sleepovers, older teenagers consider skipping college, men with travel or dating conundrums, and granddads unwilling or unable to attend family outings. With some fluid dynamics courses incorporated into my engineering degree and high motivation, I focused on developing an external aid—not a cure, but a management tool. I partnered with a recently retired 3M plastics engineer for assistance in this effort.

After 6 years of product development, with the help of over 50 volunteers testing prototypes of material similar to production-run units, I found my solution.

Maintenance

Our external device, known as Relax for Men™ (“Relax”), is a soft thermoplastic elastomer sleeve employing a protrusion at the lower inner surface that compresses the urethra, thereby impeding leakage. Feedback from test subjects was critical in determining final optimal design (see Figure).

Quality of life

This aid has effectively reduced my leakage and significantly improved my quality of life. I am now using a single liner per day. Because Relax can be worn all day and all night in comfort, I now sleep well through the night, no longer getting up to void twice per night.

Relax gave me the confidence to ignore the first urge to urinate during the night and thereby retrain my bladder to its original capacity. The aid’s size is variable and pressure settings are adjustable to the individual. Anticipating periods of stress episodes, I’m able to simply adjust the settings for temporary increased leakage protection, followed by a reset thereafter.

I found the solution to my incontinence and now hope to help others do the same. Relax is patent-pending, though not yet for sale, as we seek an industry partner to take it to market.