Shoe

I've been crazy busy at work for the last week. In order to blow off some steam, I will relate another amusing pee-related episode.

One of the problems of my MS-related neurogenic bladder is peeing at night. It's not uncommon for me to get up three times a night. I also happen to have flat feet (fallen arches, pes planus, overpronation, what you will), so I've found it convenient to stash a little plastic urinal next to the bed. When I gotta pee in the middle of the night, I reach down and grab the urinal; do my sinful, filthy business; and get back in bed.

This happens often enough that I almost do it on auto-pilot. That is to say, sometimes I'm not fully awake during the process. One night, I got up to pee, reached down to grab the container, and started peeing before most of my faculties were online. At some point, I realized that what I had grabbed was not, in fact, a urinal, but was a shoe that was in the general vicinity of the urinal. I had peed in my shoe. Actually, I did this twice (same shoe, fortunately) before I start getting careful about where I put my shoes at the end of the day.

The best part of this story is that I actually wore this shoe for some time after the afore-mentioned incidents. (For the record, the shoe was a rather comfortable Rockport oxford.) I rinsed it out and filled it up with uncooked rice (I had some notion that this would cause the shoe to smell less like pee) and let it sit for a week. Then I threw out the rice, polished the shoe and its unpeed mate, and put them back into rotation. I stopped wearing the shoe recently, because I got a nice, new pair of brown Hush Puppies. I've still got the shoe, and it smells like feet, but not pee.

This is kind of a funny thing, because my family tells this great story (true, I think) about how once, when I was a kid, somebody discovered me half-asleep peeing in the corner of the living room. I think I only did that once.