Fortis ad: David M

After my prostate surgery, this was all I was given. A sheet of paper. Kegels. Three sets a day. Hold for ten seconds. My surgeon said most men see significant improvement within three to six months. I did the exercises. Every day. Didn't skip once. Six months later I was still going through four pads a day. My name is David. I'm 63. Retired engineer. Married to my wife Carol for 31 years. I had my prostatectomy eighteen months ago. The cancer is gone. The surgeon shook my hand and told me everything went perfectly. Then he gave me a printed sheet with Kegel exercises and told me to squeeze, hold, release. Three sets of ten. Twice a day. "You should see improvement within a few months," he said. I took that sheet home and I followed it like a blueprint. I'm an engineer. I follow instructions. Every morning. Every evening. I set a timer on my phone so I wouldn't forget. Three months in, nothing had changed. Still four pads a day. Still getting up three times a night. Still wearing dark trousers every time I left the house. I went back to my surgeon. He said recovery timelines vary. Keep doing the exercises. Give it more time. So I gave it more time. Six months. Still leaking. Still four pads. Nine months. Same. A year in, my surgeon referred me to a pelvic floor physiotherapist. I went three times a week for six weeks. She was thorough. She was good at her job. She watched me do the exercises, corrected my form, taught me breathing techniques. At the end of the programme she told me I was doing well. Keep doing the exercises at home. I kept doing them. Still leaking. At sixteen months, I was sitting in my bathroom at 6 AM changing my second pad of the day and I just stopped. Sat there on the edge of the bath and stared at the floor. I wasn't angry. I was confused. I'd done everything right. Every instruction. Every appointment. Every exercise. Every single day for sixteen months. And my pad count had barely moved. If Kegels were the answer, why weren't they working? Carol could see what it was doing to me. She didn't push. She never does. But I caught her looking at me sometimes with this expression I couldn't quite read. Somewhere between worry and grief. One evening she went to bed early and I sat at the kitchen table with my laptop. I wasn't looking for a product. I was looking for an explanation. I typed "why don't Kegels work after prostate surgery" and started reading. Most of what I found was useless. The same advice repeated on a hundred different websites. Do your Kegels. Give it time. See a specialist. I'd done all of that. For sixteen months. Then I found something different. A forum post from a man who'd been in the same position. Eighteen months of Kegels. No improvement. Frustrated. Confused. Same story as mine almost word for word. And then he explained what he'd discovered. What finally made sense of the whole thing. When your prostate is removed, your internal sphincter — the muscle that used to help keep urine in automatically — gets damaged in the process. Not from a surgical error. It's an unavoidable consequence of the operation. That means after surgery, your pelvic floor muscles become your only line of defence against leaks. A job they were never designed to do alone. But here's the part that explained sixteen months of failed exercises. After surgery, the nerve pathways that help you feel and control those pelvic floor muscles are also disrupted. Which means when most men do Kegels post-surgery, they can't accurately tell whether they're squeezing the right muscles. Study after study showed the same thing. The majority of men doing unsupervised Kegels after prostate surgery are activating their glutes or their abdominals. Not their pelvic floor. They think they're training the right muscles. They're not. And there's no way to know. Because the internal feedback system that would normally tell you — the one that lets you feel whether you're squeezing the right thing — was compromised by the surgery itself. I sat back in my chair and stared at the screen. Sixteen months. Every single day. And I'd probably been squeezing the wrong muscles the entire time. Not because I was careless. Not because I wasn't trying hard enough. Because the surgery had removed the feedback system that would have told me I was doing it wrong. Nobody explained this to me. Not my surgeon. Not the physiotherapist. Not the pamphlet. The man on the forum went on to describe what finally worked for him. Not a different exercise. Not a medication. Not a surgery. A device that takes the guesswork out entirely. He explained that your inner thigh muscles — your adductors — are directly connected to your pelvic floor through shared anatomy. When you squeeze your inner thighs against resistance, your pelvic floor contracts automatically. You don't have to find the muscle. You don't have to wonder if you're doing it right. The connection does the work for you. No nerve pathway required. No internal feedback needed. The pelvic floor activates whether you can feel it or not. He'd found a device called the Fortis Control Trainer. A simple trainer you place between your knees and squeeze. Built-in counter tracks every rep. No insertion. No electrodes. No app. Just resistance. He said he went from four pads a day to none in seven weeks. I almost closed the laptop. I'd heard promises before. I'd been disappointed before. Sixteen months of doing everything right and getting nothing had made me deeply skeptical of anything that sounded too simple. But the logic made sense to me. As an engineer, I understood it immediately. If the nerve pathways are compromised, you can't rely on internal feedback to train the right muscles. You need an external mechanism that activates the pelvic floor automatically, regardless of whether you can feel it. That's exactly what the adductor connection does. And the price was $79. I'd spent more than that every month on pads for the past sixteen months. The maths was simple even if the product didn't work. It also had a 30-day guarantee where you keep the trainer even if you want a refund. I ordered it. Not with hope. With the grim determination of a man who has tried everything and has one thing left. Carol didn't know. I didn't tell her. I couldn't handle seeing that worried expression again if it didn't work. The box arrived three days later. Plain. Unmarked. I opened it at the kitchen table while she was out. It was simpler than I expected. Two padded arms. A digital counter. No wires. No manual thicker than a single page. I put it between my knees and squeezed. The counter clicked. And I felt something I hadn't felt in sixteen months of Kegels. I felt the right muscles working. Not my glutes. Not my abs. Something deeper. Something I'd been trying to reach for sixteen months and couldn't. The adductor squeeze found it immediately. Without me having to think about it. Without me having to wonder if I was doing it right. I did three sets of ten. Five minutes. Then I put the trainer on the kitchen counter and made a cup of tea. The first week I didn't tell Carol. Still using pads. Still getting up at night. But something was different. Every session I could feel those muscles engaging. Actually engaging. For the first time since my surgery. Week two. Still using pads. But I noticed I only got up twice one night instead of three times. I wrote it down. Week three. Three pads instead of four. The leaks were smaller. I sneezed getting out of the car one morning and nothing happened. I sat in the driver's seat for a full minute just processing that. Week four. Two pads. Some days one. The urgency was still there but quieter. Like the volume had been turned down. Week six. One pad most days. Some days none. I slept through the night three times that week. First time since my surgery. Carol noticed before I said anything. "You haven't asked me to pick up pads," she said one morning. I looked at her. "I don't think I need them anymore." She put her hand on the kitchen counter and didn't say anything for a long time. Then she said: "You're not going to the bathroom as much at night either. I can tell because I'm sleeping better too." I hadn't even thought about that. For sixteen months, every time I got up, I woke her up too. She'd been losing sleep right alongside me. Quietly. Without complaining. Week eight. No pads. Sleeping through most nights. I wore light trousers for the first time in eighteen months. Drove to our daughter's house forty-five minutes away without stopping. Carol booked us a table at the restaurant we used to go to before the surgery. She didn't ask if I wanted to go. She just booked it. I said yes without thinking about it. First time in eighteen months I didn't mentally calculate the distance to the bathroom before agreeing to leave the house. We sat across from each other and I ordered a beer. A full pint. Something I hadn't done in a year and a half because every drink was a countdown to a leak. Carol watched me take the first sip and her eyes filled up. "Don't," I said. "I'm not crying," she said. She was absolutely crying. It's been four months now. No pads. Sleeping through the night. Wearing whatever I want. I went to my grandson's cricket match last weekend and sat on a bench for three hours. Cheered. Clapped. Stood up. Sat back down. Didn't think about a bathroom once. Here's what I want to say to any man reading this who's been doing his Kegels for months and seeing nothing. It's probably not your fault. After prostate surgery, your internal feedback system is compromised. You can't reliably feel whether you're squeezing the right muscles. Research shows the majority of men in your position are training the wrong muscles without knowing it. You could do Kegels perfectly for five years and never reach the pelvic floor because the nerve pathways that guide you there were disrupted by the surgery. That's not a failure of effort. It's a failure of method. The Fortis Control Trainer bypasses the problem entirely. When you squeeze your inner thighs against resistance, your pelvic floor contracts automatically through a direct anatomical connection. You don't need to find the muscle. You don't need to feel it. You don't need functioning nerve feedback. The connection does the work. I also want to mention — there are cheaper versions of this type of device floating around on Amazon. They look similar. They're not the same. No calibrated resistance. No protocol. No guarantee. The one that worked for me is the Fortis Control Trainer from their actual website. That's where the 30-day guarantee applies and where you get the 8-Week Recovery Protocol. The Fortis Control Trainer costs $79. One time. No subscriptions. No replacement parts. I spent over $1,400 on pads in sixteen months. The trainer paid for itself in the first week. It comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Full refund. You keep the trainer. It ships in a plain unmarked box. Nobody knows what's inside. It comes with a free 8-Week Recovery Protocol that tells you exactly what to do each day. No guessing. No wondering if you're doing enough. If you've been doing your Kegels and nothing is changing — it's not because the exercises don't work. It's because the surgery made it nearly impossible to do them correctly without help. You don't need to try harder. You need a different way in. This is the different way in. Here's the link: https://tryfortis.store/products/fortis-control-trainer Don't spend another sixteen months doing the same thing and expecting different results. I already did that for you. — David P.S. — Months 1-16: Kegels every day. Four pads a day. Nothing changed. Week 1 with Fortis: Felt the right muscles engage for the first time. Week 3: Down to 3 pads. Sneezed without leaking. Week 4: 2 pads. Some days 1. Week 6: 1 pad most days. Sleeping through the night. Week 8: No pads. Light trousers. Drove 45 minutes without stopping. Carol booked a restaurant. I said yes without thinking about it. $79 once. 30-day guarantee. You keep it no matter what.