This is a personal essay about apps, bluetooth, and sensors. More specifically, it’s about three gadgets that I’d say were viciously overpriced except that they have pricelessly improved my life. I’m not on anyone’s payroll. I promise. (With expensive sofas being revealed as garbage, maybe save your sofa money and spend on a device.)
Perifit. Please forgive me. This one will mention urine, and for that I’m sorry. I’ll keep it short.
My friend Megan Hellerer (whose book you can pre-order now) calls conditions like UI (as I classily refer to urinary incontinence) a HAYWALT, for “how are you walking around like this?” A HAYWALT is the thing in your life—insomnia, migraines, recurrent sinus infections—that drags you down even as you’ve decided it’s just the way life is for you. My own HAYWALT is UI.
As a child I dutifully slept on metal strips a salesman installed under my sheets. These set off an alarm when I peed on them—a crude effort to get my nervous system to wake up before and not after I wet the bed. Some luck, but my troubles returned. I kept thinking This is just my cross to bear. And shut up about it. For $450 sometime in the 1990s, a urologist told me to drink less water. Then, in 2015, I had bladder-sling surgery. That’s a common but serious operation.
Still, after all that, full-blown UI seemed to be my doom, I was sure of it. But then my physical therapist mentioned Perifit.
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