Patient feels free again after undergoing procedure to end her incontinence

No Need for Accidents

When JoAnn Hughes, a 46-year-old law firm manager from Springfield, Virginia, began feeling the symptoms of stress incontinence, she was surprised.

“I thought I was too young to have that issue,” says JoAnn.

However, the symptoms – incontinence when JoAnn jumped, laughed or coughed too hard, or sneezed, among other similar activities – continued to the point that they were getting in the way of her daily activities, particularly running and exercising.

So she spoke to her doctor about the issue and eventually ended up in the office of Alok Desai, MD, a female pelvic reconstructive surgeon with Potomac Urology.

Dr. Desai diagnosed JoAnn’s stress incontinence and determined she was a candidate for a surgical treatment called a sling procedure. This procedure creates a strip of mesh or tissue (the “sling”) under the urethra, which prevents it from opening when it shouldn’t.

Following the outpatient procedure, JoAnn was out of the hospital the same day and able to return to work within a couple of days.

According to Dr. Desai, this procedure has an 85–90 percent success rate of curing stress incontinence, and in JoAnn’s case that statistic held true.

“I can exercise again now,” says JoAnn. “I was doing minimal exercising before [due to the stress incontinence], but now I can feel free to get out there and run again.”

While JoAnn was a candidate for the sling procedure, not every woman with incontinence requires surgical intervention. Treatments for incontinence provided by Dr. Desai begin with more conservative options such as bladder retraining, pelvic floor therapy or medication. If needed, more serious options are considered, including Botox® injections, implantable nerve stimulators and the sling procedure.

Speak Up

Incontinence is a common issue for women, but it often goes untreated because it’s seen as something you can’t do anything about. Dr. Desai encourages women to not accept incontinence as something they have to live with, and to talk with their doctors about the issue as soon as it begins interfering with their quality of life.

“There’s a misconception that some of these disease processes are a function of age or having children and that because a woman has had children or is older, she has to deal with them,” says Dr. Desai. “That’s not true. Regardless of what has happened prior [to a patient seeing me], if incontinence is interfering with her life, it can and should be addressed.”