Cloth diapers?

JDancer

A mobility issue has led to instantaneous urinary incontinence. I'm struggling with the environmental impact of adult diapers- used 4 overnight! We created more trash last night than the last 2 months combined. Has anyone used cloth diapers with their LO? Any other ideas?

harshedbuzz

@JDancer

I have not, but one of the men in our local support group did for a time. His wife was getting a lot of UTI and he wondered if it was because of the material in the disposable products.

It was a short-lived experiment as it didn't seem to improve the situation. He found they leaked more than disposables which led to more laundry on top of the diaper washing which is more labor intensive than sheets or clothing with removing feces, wringing out soaked diapers, double rinsing. It took a lot of extra time and effort. He saw a significant bump in his water and energy bills.

While this is about diapering babies, many aspects of the pluses and minuses remain the same.

https://www.mindbodygreen.com/articles/cloth-vs-disposable-diapers

If he's flooding overnight, would adding a doubler product help.

https://www.northshorecare.com/shop-for/incontinence-products-for-men/booster-pads-for-men/northshore-booster-pads-contoured-diaper-doublers

HB

Quilting brings calm

I used cloth diapers for baby number one for financial reasons. I used disposables for baby number 2.

There’s so much work involved in caregiving for a person with dementia. I just can’t see adding to the workload with cloth diapers. More clean-up, more laundry. Disposables are much easier to put on- you are talking about someone as big as yourself.
Please make life easier for yourself . Using disposables for one person isn’t going to have that much environmental impact. Your sanity is important too.

JDancer

I've decided cloth is a no go. I'm just glad I have plenty of supplies on hand. I've been using our Medicare CVS purchasing benefit to stock up on pads, wipes and underwear. Hopefully, this too shall pass, for now, but I know it's in our future.

MN Chickadee

I was in the same boat, horrified by the amount of waste we were sending to the landfill, but this is not the hill to die on. It's just too hard to manage a PWD and that level of laundry to do cloth. I did cloth diapers for my 2 babies but they nap and learn and are tiny and manageable, it was just different. Do good in the rest of life and let it go. For overnight you might like a heavy duty diaper- we used North Shore Care products. They have symbols that tell you the absorbency - some over night products are much higher absorbency than your normal Depends product from the store, and will last all night.