Why So Many Couples Over 60 Take Turns Getting Up All Night (It’s Not His Prostate)
Harold took the window seat.
In forty-five years of marriage, on every flight longer than two hours, Harold has taken the aisle. He was the one who had to get up. Twice on the way to Phoenix. Three times on the way to Hawaii, the year we went for our 35th.
This time it was our 45th. Nine hours to Vienna, for a river cruise on the Danube we had saved up for since the grandkids were small. At the gate, he handed me the aisle ticket without a word.
I got up four times before breakfast. Harold slept from somewhere over Newfoundland until the coffee cart came by.
I’m 67. I spent that flight watching the little seatbelt light and counting the people ahead of me in line for the lavatory.
On the boat it was worse. Our cabin bathroom was the size of a phone booth, and the fan roared like a jet engine. Three times a night I sat on the edge of my bed, waiting to be sure.
Across the cabin, Harold slept like a log.
Our hallway relay.
Back home in Macon, our nights had run like a relay race for about eleven years. Harold up at one. Me at two-thirty. Harold again at four. Two bladders, one hallway, and a bathroom door that squeaks no matter what you spray on it.
Some nights we passed each other in the hallway like two ships. He’d mumble sorry. I’d mumble sorry. Neither one of us had slept more than three hours in a row since our first grandbaby was born.
And the mornings were worse than the nights. Two tired people at one kitchen table, both pretending we were fine, both too worn out to go anywhere that didn’t have a restroom we already knew.
His trouble started around 59. His doctor said prostate and gave him the pill that opens things up. It helped his stream a little. It also made him dizzy when he stood up in the night. One January he caught himself on the towel bar and pulled it clean out of the wall.
Mine started around 58, after the change. No leaks. Just the alarm. That “right now” feeling at two in the morning, and again at four.
My doctor gave me a bladder prescription. The first one dried my mouth out like cotton. The newer one worked better, and cost $116 a month after Medicare.
So that was our house. One pill for him, another for her. Two prescriptions, two copays, two trips to the pharmacy window. And we were both still up.
We had done everything else, too. Nothing to drink after six. No coffee after lunch. I did my squeezing exercises at every red light in Bibb County for three years.
“My husband and I had a running joke about who won the night. Whoever got up fewer times picked the TV show the next evening. Nobody ever really won. We were both just tired.”
June R. · 71 · Tampa, FL
★★★★★
Then, last spring, one of us stopped running.
The spring Harold stopped getting up.
Last March, Harold’s fishing buddy Leon told him about a softgel. Leon drove a truck for thirty-eight years. He says it’s the only reason he can make the drive down to his daughter’s in Florida now without a single rest stop.
It was mostly pumpkin seed oil, cold-pressed, with a little saw palmetto for the prostate. One a day with supper. Harold showed his doctor the label, kept everything else the same, and started.
By May he was getting up once. By June, most nights, not at all.
I noticed because the hallway light stopped coming on at one o’clock. It still came on at two-thirty. That was me.
I didn’t connect the two. Why would I? It said prostate on the package. I don’t have a prostate.
It took a woman in Austria, a plate of salad and a paper napkin to set me straight.
“Everybody has a bladder.”
On the third day of the cruise, the boat docked near Vienna and our group went up into the vineyards to a little family wine tavern.
The owner’s mother brought out the salad herself. Frau Gruber was 79, born on a pumpkin farm in Styria, in the green hills of southern Austria. The potatoes were dressed with an oil so dark green it looked black.
Harold, making conversation, pointed at it and said, “That’s what’s in my prostate pills.”
She laughed at him. Not unkindly. “Prostate? In Styria my grandmother took a spoon of this for her bladder. My mother too. The men take it, the women take it. Everybody has a bladder.”
Then she took a pen out of her apron and drew on my napkin.
The Same-Bladder Rule.
Here’s what she drew, and what I’ve read about it since.
A man’s nights have two halves. The first is the prostate. It grows with age and squeezes the tube, so he never empties all the way.
The second is the bladder muscle itself. With age it gets jumpy and sounds the alarm at half full, like a smoke detector that goes off every time you make toast. That false alarm is what gets most people out of bed at 2 a.m.
Harold’s prescription worked on the tube. It did nothing for the alarm. That’s why he was still up for years.
Pumpkin seed oil works on the alarm side, the bladder muscle.
And here is the thing nobody tells women. That muscle is the same muscle in a woman. After the change, it gets jumpy the same way. We just don’t have the prostate half.
So the part of Harold’s softgel that finally let him sleep was never the prostate part. It was the bladder part. The part I needed too.
When we got home I looked it all up, because I kept the books at an elementary school for thirty years and I check everything twice.
Germany’s official herbal commission listed pumpkin seed for an “irritable bladder” back in 1985. In 2012, the European Medicines Agency recognized its traditional use for the urinary symptoms of an overactive bladder. Not men’s symptoms. Bladder symptoms.
In Japan, researchers gave pumpkin seed oil to 45 adults with an overactive bladder for twelve weeks. Their bladder symptom scores were significantly lower by week six, and lower again by week twelve.
So why is it sold to men in a package that says prostate? Because that’s the aisle where the money is. And nobody can patent a salad oil, so nobody spends a dime telling women about it.
Not every pumpkin seed oil is the same.
I want to save you the mistake my sister made. When I told her all this, she bought the cheapest pumpkin seed oil she could find online. Three big capsules a day, and not a word on the label about how it was pressed. Six weeks later, nothing.
Cheap seed oil is often pressed hot or pulled out with solvents, because that squeezes more oil out of every seed. It also cooks the part that does the work. What’s left is still oil. It just isn’t the oil that helped Harold.
Here is what I told her to look for, and what was on Harold’s package all along. Cold-pressed. A full 1,000 mg in each softgel. One a day, not three. And no automatic shipments, ever.
“My wife was borrowing my softgels for a month before I caught on. I was mad for about a day, until I realized she’d stopped waking me up at two. Now we order the five pouches. Same shelf, two names on it.”
Walter J. · 72 · Detroit, MI
★★★★★
See the softgel we both take now →
I started taking his.
Back in Macon, I started taking one of Harold’s softgels with supper. I didn’t tell him. I’m not proud of that part.
Before I did, I showed the package and the napkin to my own doctor. She read the label, said it was fine to try along with what I was already doing, and said we’d look at my prescription together at my next visit.
I’m telling you that on purpose. Don’t stop or change a prescription on your own. Bring the label. It’s a two-minute conversation.
Week two, Harold stood in front of the cabinet and said, “Bernice, these are going awfully fast.”
Week three, I got up once. Just once. I lay there waiting for the second time the way you wait for the other shoe to drop. It never dropped.
Week five, I woke up at ten after six and didn’t know where I was. I hadn’t slept that long since our youngest left for college.
In September we drove to Savannah to see the grandkids. Neither one of us asked to stop. Around Dublin, Harold looked over at me and said, “You haven’t asked once.”
I said, “Neither have you.”
“We drove six hours to our grandkids in Charlotte. Usually I’m the one making him pull over. This time neither of us asked. My grandson said, Lola, you made it the whole way!”
Tess A. · 68 · Jacksonville, FL
★★★★★
“He takes it for his nights, I take it for mine. Week four I was down to once. It’s the only thing in our medicine cabinet the two of us have ever agreed on.”
Debra K. · 64 · Greenville, SC
★★★★★
Get one order for the two of you →
Harold, of course, had already done the math.
One pouch for him, one for her.
He worked it out on the back of an envelope, the way he does everything.
One pouch is thirty softgels. For two of us, that’s fifteen nights. Three pouches, Buy 2, Get 1 Free, are about forty-five nights each.
Five pouches, Buy 3, Get 2 Free, are 150 softgels. That’s about seventy-five nights each for the two of us, at the lowest price per pouch, and less than a coffee a day per person.
My bladder prescription alone was $116 a month.
The first change usually shows up between week three and week six. The five-pouch order is the one that carries both of you past that, and it’s the one most people choose.
We keep the pouches on one shelf now. Nobody steals anybody’s anything.
Try five pouches for two, 90 days risk-free →
The softgel we both take
- ✓The price you see is your total. No add-ons, no hidden fees at checkout.
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- ✓One-time purchase. No subscription, ever. Nothing renews, nothing reships, no card kept on file.
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value 33 pouches · 90 softgelsBuy 2, Get 1 Free · about 45 nights each for twoOr about 3 months for oneSee fall
price 11 pouch · 30 softgelsShipping not included15 nights each for twoSee fall
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