Story #12: A Cure for Numbness

Story #12: A Cure for Numbness (Content Tags: Humiliation, diaper dependency, wetting, messing, physical and mental degradation, status loss, first-person perspective, light sexual content) "The medication is still in its trial phases, so you might encounter some unexpected side-effects while on it. I'm sure you'll find the risks an acceptable sacrifice to make." The doctor hadn't been wrong when he'd told me that, but he also hadn't been very forthcoming about what those symptoms might be. Rash? Runny nose? Fever? Insomnia? Those were the kind of symptoms that I'd been anxiously expecting, not... Well, let's just say that I didn't expect the need to trade in my boxers for something more protective at the ripe or spry age of thirty-three. As to whether or not that was an acceptable sacrifice? A worthwhile consequence for the sake of my health? It unfortunately was, or else I wouldn't have elected to stay on the stuff past the first unexpected leakage. I wouldn’t have gone through with the entire trial of injections, for which there was no coming back from. I had a rare form of neuropathy. It came bundled with a larger overall condition, one of unfortunate genetic luck, but the neuropathy was the most egregious symptom. It didn't contain itself to just my hands and feet, but had spread from my extremities upward, to where both numbness and shooting pain became a daily struggle. This medication was supposed to rejuvenate the nervous system, to fix what my disease had broken, but perhaps it'd been a little too effective. The pain was gone within days, but within a couple of weeks, I'd started to wake up in a puddle, and not long after that, the accidents had migrated to my waking life too. I worked a front-facing position in the hospitality industry, so hosing my pants, or worse, in front of a customer was not an option. My doctor had informed me that it was simply a byproduct of my nerves being healed, and that I should eventually be able to retrain them to have the same memory and acuity that an adult should have. In the lengthy meantime, which could very well be either months or years, I would need a more contemporary solution. Insurance would pay for...Adult tabbed briefs, so that was what I ended up being put into. The dignified title they were given was a sham; everyone knew what they really were, there was no hiding the truth: they were adult diapers. Adult diapers for a man who had been rendered effectively incontinent. Double-incontinence, as some might call it, since neither my bladder nor my bowels elected to listen to my commands anymore, nor would they put themselves on a schedule I could attempt to memorize or plan around. The toilet would be a thing of yesterday, a throne for which I might only sit while clipping my toenails in the bathroom; its true functionality would become pointless to me, just like a toddler might view it. Adjusting to a life in diapers was more difficult than I could have predicted. I had to buy an entirely new wardrobe, especially pants, because my old stuff would no longer effectively conceal the bulk between my legs. I'd always worn form-fitting clothes, but if I tried that now, then I would be showing a very obvious outline of a diaper, and I'd have a big waistband poking out for everyone to see. So baggy became a way of fashion for me. Extra room for the diaper to breathe, and longer shirts to keep everything totally veiled. After a few close calls with my waistband, and with the way the diaper sagged after usage, I would also begrudgingly buy a few onesies to wear underneath my clothes. The snapped crotch gave two major benefits: ease of access for changing, and keeping gravity from dragging my hefty padding down and against my pants. The onesies wouldn't be the end of my foray into the infantile though; after a couple of leaks and blowouts, as well as nearly being discovered on smell alone, I had to add plastic pants to the party. The diapers I wore were already very thick, of a medical grade capacity, but I also needed them to hold for the majority of my long shifts, since I couldn't take ten to fifteen minutes to go get changed every few hours. I had to get used to the feeling of sitting in my own droppings, in my own puddles, for hours at a time. It was utterly repulsive at first, but in time, I managed to become accustomed to the feeling. Enough powder and rash prevention cream kept my skin from the perils of extensive contact with my own filth, and after about a month, I'd become completely indifferent to the squishing sensation around my groin and under my backside. It helped that I mostly worked alone. My job at the hotel had me working the front desk overnight, where I hardly had any guests come up, and where the only other employee was an overnight maintenance worker. It was actually the perfect position to become diaper dependent at, because it really didn't change any of the logistics of the job, except for getting rid of the need for bathroom breaks. While the newfound undergarments were low impact in my workplace, they had a higher cost in my personal life. I kept it a secret from my friends and family, because I found it too embarrassing to explain, but I couldn't keep it from my wife. I think she was put off at first, for obvious reasons, but she supported the medical intervention that I had sought out. The consequences of letting my disease continue unhindered would have had dramatic effects on my quality of life, and eventually on my health as a whole, so the diapers were a small price to pay. Or so I thought. It was my belief that things would eventually settle into a groove. That the embarrassment of my predicament would subside as time went on, and that my medical realities would be put through the mundane filter of adulthood. That was what the mature thing would be, was it not? A man wouldn't be shamed for something he couldn't control, not since the vicious days of the schoolyard, right? But things did get weird. Things did change, and in ways that I never would have imagined before my treatment started. Most critical was the way that my relationship dynamics would change with my wife. Up until that point, we had always had a very typical arrangement;  I was supposed to be the man, the dominant component within our duo, and she was the submissive woman. We both worked of course, which was just a reality of the modern economy, but our roles were otherwise very traditional. Two factors would tip those scales: the first was obviously my newfound diaper dependency, but the second was that my wife would get a very lucrative promotion shortly after I became padded. Seemingly overnight, our wage disparity ballooned to figures that left me emasculated. She became the primary breadwinner, and my salary was seen as purely supplementary. I didn't expect much to change from it, except for better financial security in our household, but within a couple of weeks, I found myself feeling smaller and smaller when in her presence. Her expectations of my contributions to the house would change too; my meager income was no longer enough to justify my laziness with the household chores, especially whenever my hours were so much fewer in quantity and effort. She saw her career as too important to break focus from, and it fell to me to start maintaining our home. It was embarrassing, but I didn't fight her on it. With the tourism season slowing down for the year, my hours at the hotel were being cut, and so I had increasingly more free time to take care of things. It was a sensible decision. The bigger problem came with how allegedly inept she viewed my handiwork as being. She wasted no opportunity to scold me for screwing something up, with the chastising that I would have expected from my mother, not my wife. Wrong brands while shopping, unsatisfactory cleaning around the house, dishes put away in the improper spot, laundry poorly folded, and so on. And whenever I tried to defend myself, she could disarm me with a single pointed comment about how I was a helpless 'man-baby'. Diapers and all. That angle of attack was the most difficult for me to recover from, because it did make me feel like less of a man. How was I supposed to be the master of the household, whenever I couldn't even master the toilet again? Once the seal on that was broken, once she recognized the weak spot, our dynamic would be forever altered. I don't know if a switch had flipped inside of her, where she stopped respecting me once she no longer felt the need to, but I felt it with full force. She was the breadwinner, and I was the man-baby; she was responsible and I was a fuck-up. Our sex life had already been put on pause for a while, mostly because I'd been trying to adjust to my medication, and partially because we so infrequently seemed to have the energy after our collective labors. Those were the excuses that I was comfortable with holding close, and it was easy to see why, because they were things that sounded reasonable and manageable. Truth be told, she was the one spurning my advances for the most part; the medication came with a seemingly positive side-effect of a reawakened libido, which I thought would have been great, but it'd really just ended up with me being blue-balled more often. Getting that cold shoulder, I of course would do what any horny man would, and I took care of the matter below by myself. Masturbation had never been particularly shameful to me, and even under this sad reason for it, I didn't have trouble with taking care of business. The first few times, I went through the effort of taking off my diaper, because it felt obstructive and frankly pathetic to be wearing one while getting frisky. As time went on though, and after an increasingly unlucky streak in having an accident upon climax or before, that would cease to be an option. I would have liked to think that the decision was my own, but it wasn't. My wife flipped her lid at the stain I'd left on the bedspread, and when I'd meekly explained the circumstances, she'd commanded that if I was going to be doing 'that', then I needed to stay padded. She wasn't wrong, not really, since my bladder and bowels were extremely unpredictable, but it still stung to be forced to wear them while jerking off. It took a little while to become accustomed to it, but within a few weeks, I'd become a pro at nutting in my diapers with the same ease as doing so into a pair of boxers. Admittedly, the friction of the diaper actually made for a more powerful arousal, and that went double for when the diaper was in a state of disarray... So, my sex life had become a hand down my diaper. My romantic life had been reduced to being shamed and emasculated. My work life was becoming a smaller and smaller part of my week. And my health? Other than the incontinence, it was better than ever. The doctor had mentioned sacrifices and what would or wouldn't be worthwhile, and he'd been right on the money. If I'd known exactly how much I'd be giving up, and there was still a massive amount of sacrifice still to go, then I probably would have had more pause. I had traded physical pain for emotional pain, and that anguish couldn't be easily healed. There was no turning back either. The medicine wasn't some daily pill or monthly injection that could be halted at any time; it had been a series of three injections, each two weeks apart, and then that was it. Everything that was going to happen, good and bad, was already in motion, and there was no actual way to stop it. My nerves would be rejuvenated to an earlier state, and they would stay that way. No more neuropathy, but also a stripping of signals that'd taken decades to mature to the point they had been in. What I hadn't considered, and what my doctor had failed to properly warn me of, was that the medication might work a little more effectively than I would want it to. Nerves ran throughout the whole body, so issues from the rejuvenation process could occur pretty much anywhere; the bladder and bowels had only been so noticeable, because the impact was so devastating and immediate. My coordination was starting to falter, not from a weakening of the muscles or joints, but from the deprogrammed nerves that made movement possible. They learned something new as quickly as they forgot the old, but the new was inexperienced and being asked to run before crawling. I got clumsier, by a noticeable margin, and my dexterity started to regress. It was around this time, whenever I was wobbling around like a buffoon, that my job quietly would let me go. They started by lowering my hours little by little, until I only had one night a week, and then I got taken into the manager's office for the 'difficult talk' about cutbacks. The financial loss was a blip on my wife's radar. My earnings were practically pocket change by this point in comparison to what she was making, so she didn't care much that I'd become unemployed. Seeing how much more trouble I was having with my mobility, and having already grown tired of my inability to get 'simple tasks' done, she hired a housekeeper to manage the household affairs. That gave me a lot of time to sit around and twiddle my thumbs. I filled in the vacuum with hobbies and television, while seeming to not recognize that the housekeeper's duties were evolving more each day, until she was far more a live-in nanny. It didn't occur to me whenever she was bringing me meals, or the embarrassing times I had to ask for help getting dressed, but it was impossible to ignore whenever she made it her business to take care of my business. I'd been on the couch, where I'd been slowly letting my tummy pack on the pudge, and I'd been wearing little more than a pair of sweatpants and a tank top; my diaper had been wet a few times, a predictable result of the beer cans on the coffee table, and I was starting to get gassy. Lazily, I leaned to one side to let a wet one ripple out, and to little surprise, I'd felt a torrent of steaming hot mush pile up underneath my buttcheeks. It was such a normal occurrence, that it didn't make me flinch by this point; I just sat back down in the muck, feeling it paint the bottom of my balls brown, and I practically shrugged. My show still had about twenty minutes, and it wasn't like I needed to be in a hurry to do anything, least of all change a shitty diaper. Changing myself had become much more difficult with my immature coordination, to the point where I just had to jump in the shower, and then it took forever to tape a new one on. The whole process was a hassle, so yeah, no rush. And then Jenny, the sweet woman who was easily fifteen years my senior, had come into the room to collect my beer cans, and she smelled the mound I was settled upon. She was sweet about it at first, asking with a subtle tongue about whether I was okay or needed anything, and I tried to politely blow her off. She left for a few minutes, but she then returned with wipes and a clean diaper. I thought she was trying to push me to go clean myself up, but no, she was actually pushing me to lay down and lift my legs. I argued about it with her, but my voice was tipsy and weak, and so was my body. She changed my disgustingly packed diaper right there in the lounge, with the experience of a babysitter who had been at it for decades, and then she pulled my plastic pants right back up over a fresh diaper, and left me to finish my show. That was the first time, but not nearly the last. Whenever I sheepishly mentioned it to my wife that evening, she didn't seem at all surprised. "Jenny isn't just here to clean up and cook. You need someone to take care of you, and I just don't have the time." It was almost ironic to hear that. My wife had been adamant about having kids a few years prior, and I'd put my foot down about not being interested; now that she basically had one in the house, it was her turn to be disinterested in the notion. And make no bones about it, a kid was essentially what I had been reduced to. There was a lot I could no longer easily do for myself, and with my day-drinking increasing, I wasn't exactly keeping the emotional or intellectual sharpness of an adult either. It was around that time that I recognized how little our relationship resembled a marriage. She'd moved me out of the bedroom weeks prior, to the guest room, because she didn't want to wake up to the smell of a poopy diaper; it'd been months since we had any form of intimacy, and she didn't even talk to me like an adult, let alone her husband. I should have felt something. I should have felt misery or strife about where my life had gone in such a short time; perhaps anger at my doctor, or my boss, or my wife? Maybe even some sliver of happiness for the fact that my excruciating physical pain was a thing of the past? But I didn't. I felt nothing. I felt like I was in a bizarre between state, where my old life was on one side, and the new life being built was on the other, and I was just awkwardly in the middle. Things were devolving, I was ironically degrading while being rejuvenated, and the writing was on the wall for what sort of undignified invalid I'd be within a year. Just an oversized toddler who shit in his pants and had nanny wipe his bottom; someone who tripped over his laces, or who needed a bib to eat, who couldn't be trusted with a real cup. My speech was even starting to slur, and not just from the booze. Shouldn't I have felt fear? Or remorse? Or grief for the man I was leaving to the past? Nope. Aside from the radiant warmth of the turd that had just snaked its way out into my saturated diaper, and the horny tingling that followed, I just felt numb. Some cure for numbness this had turned out to be.