New York Times editor Dana Jennings writes each week about living with prostate cancer, and this week he has a few interesting points to make about the incontinence that often accompanies this condition.

Dana writes with remarkable frankness about his own experiences with incontinence and his need, albeit temporarily, for incontinence pants (or man-diapers as they are referred to by our American cousins).

There are moments of self-effacing humour “I still wear man-pads, having learned that bladder control can be ambushed by a laugh, a sneeze or an especially high curb” mixed in with sage advice “wherever I go, I still do urinary recon, scouting out the nearest men’s room”.

The conclusions are decidedly upbeat “we are not our incontinence … in the end it’s just a biomechanical flaw … and if I have to get up more often than other people to go to the bathroom – I can live with that”.

In the end, that philosophy is hard to fault.