@fritzo -

I just drank my usual fluids (64 ounces daily, more or less) the day I got my catheter out. I’d never bothered to switch to the leg bag and stayed on the overnight bag my entire eight days of being cathed, just because I would have filled that leg bag every few minutes. I showed up at the doc’s office with the big bag, which some of the nurses thought was kind of funny.

Daily pad count - I started very high, around 15 a day, plus two briefs (one daily, one overnight) - that’s probably because it took me a while to work out when to change, so I was initially changing just about every time one got wet.

Those things can actually hold quite a bit, so after a couple of weeks, I got used to the idea of letting them go a little longer between changes, and got it down to more like 10-12 a day (which was still a lot).

I had my follow-up to surgery at about the three-week point (after catheter removal) and the doc was surprised I was still using so many. That’s what got them to get me set up with PT sooner rather than later.

Over the coming weeks, it dwindled. Now, about 3-1/2 months out, I’m down to 4-5 pads every 24 hours. At home, I just wear them inside regular briefs, but when I go out, I switch back to a Depends brief. I don’t trust myself completely yet as far as leaking through to my pants (though it hasn’t happened yet).

I think doggie poop bags would be fine for disposing of the pads, but not big enough for the briefs, should you need to change those.

I don’t need anything extra in the way of pockets. What I do is get a wipe and fold that into a little square that is about the same dimensions as a pad, which is about the size of a fat wallet. Then I get a plastic shopping bag, put the pad and the wipe in there, and just wrap the bag tightly around that. It’s really not much bigger than, say, two big iPhones stacked on top of each other. It easily fits in my front or back pocket, and then I just head straight to the restroom to make the change and then carry on shopping.

Even at my worst, I never needed to make a second change in the same store. That was always most likely to happen at a restaurant, where sitting for an extended time is involved. Still, I didn’t carry in my backpack unless the car was parked in a parking garage or some other distant lot, I just walked out and grabbed another pad-wipe-bag combo and went back in and changed. No problem.

For me, it was an aggravating inconvenience (understatement) for about a week. Then it just got set in my mind that, “This is what I need to do now,” and I got on with it, and before long, it was simply built into my routine - every stop on a busy Saturday would likely involve a pad change. That was how I looked at it, and it’s amazing how adaptable humans can be, I think. Before long, I wasn’t even really thinking about it much.

I know a lot of that sounds pretty dire, so I’ll tell you that I had my first real improvement right at the two-month point, which was very encouraging. If you’re like me (and you may well work this much quicker), it’s the first two months that were the hardest, and it wasn’t even the going out or the daytime, it was the overnight - up every two hours like clockwork to pee and change into a fresh pad.

That’s the first bit that got better for me - with no notice, just like a switch had been flipped, I stopped peeing in my pants while standing up from the bed. All of a sudden, I was able to walk to the bathroom and pee like the good ol’ days, and over time, I could go longer and longer between getting up to pee.

Now, I get up twice at most, and in the mornings, my pad is almost completely dry. Daytime is still not great, but getting better. Mornings are better than afternoons. I can usually make it to noon before my first pad change (I get up at 7:30AM), so each day is a little better.