Writing WeeFree Women and setting up this website has been a long journey for me with several false starts and hiccups along the way. The idea for WeeFree Women grew out of my own experience of incontinence as a teenager and young adult. The veil of secrecy drawn across this common problem and the limited information available led me to suffer in emabarrased silence and ignorance for many years.

I studied physiotherapy with the aim of curing the world's pains, but along the way discovered the work of Pauline Chiarelli and other women's health physiotherapists and realised that my problem with incontinence was not only common, but completely curable through effective pelvic floor training. I was able to use my new found knowledge to vastly improve my own life and started to wonder how many other women were suffering for the want of a little bit of knowledge.

When my children were little I was involved in some wonderful parents groups and an early childhood education cooperative in New Zealand called Playcentre (http://www.playcentre.org.nz). I found that some of my well read, vibrant, knowledge hungry friends were having the same problems with incontinence that I was, and that they too had been suffering in silence and ignorance. I started wondering how I could spread the knowledge about incontinence and it's cure to all the new mums. My chance came when I was invited to be part of the foundation committee for a new parent program called SPACE (You can read more about the program at http://www.space.org.nz).  I volunteered to be the guest speaker at several of the pilot sites and my topic was "Looking after your pelvic floor after having a baby". The program still includes a guest speaker and I'm sure that sometimes it's a women's health physio, but my involvement ended when our family relocated to Australia.

After the move I spent a few years working long hours in a harsh corporate environment to help boost the family coffers. When I found myself working unpaid over weekends and having to protect my team from a bullying boss, I decided it was time to get back to helping women with incontinence.

Australia has a fantastic body of knowledge about incontinence and there is lots of research being done here to support the work that physio's do to cure incontinence, but this knowledge still isn't reaching the average woman.

While the work I do with individual women is helpful, there are still millions of women both here in my adopted country and in other parts of the world whose only help with incontinence is the pad they surrepticiously wear each day. So I decided to write a book and set up a website where women could come together to share their experiences, learn what can be done to prevent or cure incontinence and join me in the effort to spread the message to other women.

The book was finally published in September 2011, but soon after it was published I developed a serious heart problem. Due to delays in correctly diagnosing my problem, I was largely incapacitated for almost 9 months. I gave up all hope of ever getting this website finished or being able to spread the WeeFree message. Luckily, a brave young doctor dared to disagree with the cardiology consultant's diagnosis which set in motion a series of events that saw me fitted with a pacemaker a few days later. I'm forever grateful to that doctors courage to disagree with a senior's opinion, because it saved my life.

Getting my pacemaker has been like having a new beginning. I am picking up the pieces where I dropped them all those months ago. The website is active and I'm ready to spread the WeeFree message once again.