The "No-Wet" Safe Bet!
Written: Jun 16 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: easy to use, highly effective
Cons: atrociously expensive
The Bottom Line: It works, she liked it, we liked it. Great for all once you swallow hard at the price.
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| neuhofer's Full Review: Malem Enuresis Alarm - 8 Tone |
Our Background
Last spring (2005) we were getting a bit concerned about our daughter’s bed-wetting. Although she had just turned four, we knew a lot of her friends were dry at night – some who were far younger, or had become dry at night much earlier. Her wetting was consistent – plenty in the Pull-Up and every night. If she ever fell asleep in the day (say, on a long drive) we could be confident she’d be OK for a couple of hours, but nights just weren’t working for us.
We weren’t really in a panic yet, thinking she might grow out of it. But on the other hand, we knew that there is a hereditary link. My brother was perscribed a nasal spray to solve his bedwetting problem when he was 10 (yep, every morning we’d see that heap of bedding at the bottom of the stairs). My husband remembers that he was old enough to be in school and having sleep-overs at friends’ and worrying about whether he’d be dry that night.
With that in mind, we attempted a useless and frustrating course of star charts for success based upon limiting liquids in the evening and hauling her out of bed to the toilet when we were going to sleep (as well as usually one middle-of-the-night pit stop when my husband would wake up). We tried this for about 5 weeks and the best we ever got was 4 nights dry in a row (usually 1 or 2). We observed that she simply seemed to sleep so deeply that you might have thought her drugged. After “canning” (pun intended!) this attempt, we hoped she might start to grow out of it, but we were right back to wet every night.
Our Process
In late fall 2005, our daughter was 4.5. We did a lot of reading about enuresis online – one of the best sites we found was www.drgreene.com. Reading statistics there about the percentage of 4-year-olds who will still wet the bed at ages 5 and 6, propelled us to take action. We were also happy to read that the alarms were thought more successful than a drug solution.
Dear Daughter was pretty excited about the prospects that an alarm would help her learn to be dry at night. She had commented occasionally about her wet nights, usually after we had a family sleep-over with friends whose same-age daughter was dry. We didn’t buy the alarm right away. We thought the price was rather atrocious and we weren’t prepared to compound that by paying higher shipping into Canada and the duty. (I don’t know if there are Canadian retailers of the Malem alarms, but I couldn’t find any).
We waited about 3 months, until my husband brought the alarm home from a US business trip. Looking back, the lengthy anticipation may have helped with our daughter’s immediate acceptance of wearing the alarm.
The manual gave pretty realistic instructions and expectations about how nights will progress and how weeks progress toward success. But things went WAY better than we anticipated. I had listened to clips of the various alarm tones on amazon.com and found it much, MUCH quieter than I had expected. I guess I had the stereo volume too high when I sampled the sounds – I was expecting “window-rattling-car-alarm” decibels! :-) Not to mislead – it’s plenty loud enough to wake her up. But it didn’t always wake me up in the next room and it never phased our 3-year-old who shares the bed with her sister, nor the baby who was in our room.
We (ie. pretty much always my husband!) got up with our daughter for the first four nights or so. The first couple of those, the alarm went off twice and she was wet enough that she had to change her panties and sometimes pajamas, but the bedding was A-OK. She was extremely drowzy the first few nights. After that, it was smooth sailing for all. The alarm continued to wake her once nightly. But she was completely proficient at quickly shutting it off, getting herself to the bathroom, and back to bed. Sometimes we woke up just enough to realize it was happening, often not. I have a very DEEP appreciation for sleep and had been apprehensive about the whole process, but this was turning out GREAT!
Our daughter seemed to be dry at night consistently by somewhere around the 6 week mark (just around the time she turned 5). We continued using the alarm for a total of 3 months, which had been our plan based on the instruction book. During the final week or two, she started to protest about wearing the alarm, but was easily reassured.
We’ve now been alarm free for almost 2 months – so about 3.5 months since the alarm actually woke her up at night. Not one night dribble among them. Yippee!
Our daughter felt really empowered by having the alarm. We never really talked about bedwetting much, but she was starting to realize through peers that it wasn’t A-OK. When she got her alarm, she was so proud of it that she told every person she met that she had a new alarm to help her learn how to stay dry at night. Every visitor to our house just had to ooh and ahh about that important little pink box. Now that we are done with it, she often mentions it when seeing it in the bedroom, telling me about how she likes it so much and wants to take such good care of it. It’s almost earned the esteem of a favourite toy in her mind, as she credits the alarm entirely with her success.
Buying Decision
We purchased our alarm through www.bedwettingstore.com.
We think the price of the alarms are absolutely atrocious when you consider the mechanics of them and feel that it’s simply a case of holding parents hostage. However, this company isn’t charging any more for the alarms than lots of other places. They had very good information and a well-designed website. Their phone customer service was awesome to handle our Canadian credit card order, with special shipping instructions to my husband’s hotel in the US. The shipping was super-quick. I would definitely recommend dealing with them.
We did investigate buying a used alarm on eBay. We were a bit concerned that if the sensor hadn’t been properly cleaned, we’d need to buy a replacement ($17.95 plus shipping). There aren’t a lot of them for sale on eBay and they are so expensive that you aren’t really much ahead for the possible risk of a faulty sensor or broken wire contact.
We bought the Malem Ultimate 1S, with 8 selectable tones and vibration. We didn’t know if any tones would be more successful than others and wondered if the vibration would be necessary for our deep sleeper. We figured this “Cadillac” model was only $10 more than the most basic, which was pretty minor when the whole thing (alarm, shipping, taxes) set us back $113US. We liked that this model has a smaller control unit than some of their others. There is a very nice comparison photo of all the Malem alarms side-by-side at http://www.bedwettingstore.com/assortment.htm. We also noticed that this model uses 2 AAA batteries rather than pricey and less-easily-purchased button-cell batteries and figured that alone was worth the extra money.
Closing
Although I usually go into all the details about dimensions, etc, I won’t here. All that information is clear right on the website.
We expect we’ll need the alarm for our other kids. In spite of the cost, we have already recouped it in savings on Pull-Ups with using it for only one child. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to everyone.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
neuhofer
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Location: Manitoba, CANADA
Reviews written: 18
Trusted by: 1 member
About Me:
"Inside I'm a redhead!" . . .nothing more needs to be said ;-)
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