Anyone else dealing with spouse who flat out refuses to wear any kind of incontinence product. Even went so far as to buy the cotton briefs at $25.00 per pair which are washable and very soft. He takes them off every time I insist he wear them. He can go through a dozen pair of boxers every night. Needless to say my laundry is endless.
Advice I have heard from others: be sure to call them adult disposable underwear and never Depends or diapers.
Mixed bag here. My wife does wear pads (the heaviest available) and they were her idea. But she will not wear adult disposable underwear at night when she needs more protection. So the ALF has to change her sheets a lot, though she also sleeps on a pad that absorbs much of the liquid and makes things more manageable. I am waiting for a new OT evaluation over the subject.
Yes, my DH always wore boxers, but as they became more and more yellow- stained, I gradually kept throwing them out. I think he had prostate issues, and his underwear would become quite urine-stained, to the point where I couldn't get the stains out. He was always a super-immaculate person, so I explained that he needed to switch to the padded white briefs to both catch the urine and so I could bleach them white. (I don't think he totally understood the conversation, but I stressed that I was trying to keep his underwear clean--he did understand that, I think.) So as I gradually threw out the boxers and replaced them with the white cotton padded briefs that I was finding online from various websites, he really had no choice but to wear them. Here was the biggest problem: Some of them don't have a fly, and have to be pulled down. He hated that, and I had to really be careful to get the ones that have a fly. Sometimes it wasn't really made clear on the websites. And as you said, katlady, those things aren't cheap.
The above situation was when he was still able to get himself to the bathroom and toilet himself without help. There was a long, gradual downward progression, but it got to the point where he needed help with toileting, he was becoming incontinent of stool, he could no longer handle the zipper/snap/belt kind of slacks...and we ended up going to adult incontinent briefs (never, ever say "diapers") and to fleece pants that I could just pull up and down. Where I had my biggest headaches (well, the whole progression was a headache--the arguing with him and explaining over and over again why he couldn't wear his boxers...on and on and on) but once he was really bad and in the hospital bed at night, he would pull off his adult incontinent briefs and just urinate or have a stool in the bed. It was as if he thought he shouldn't do it in the briefs...but didn't have the mental capacity to understand he should call me to take him to the bathroom. (I was right there beside him in the big bed.) Sigh. No wonder I was a wreck. The good old days.