Incontinence is the medical term for the inability to hold your urine or bowel movements long enough to get to a restroom. When you experience extreme shortness of breath, your body goes into “survival mode”. When your oxygen level is dangerously low, the body starts shutting down and conserving oxygen for the most vital organs. In survival mode, oxygen is diverted away from organs like the bladder and bowel (as they are not necessary for survival), to the parts of our bodies that keep us alive: heart, brain, and lungs. This is an automatic physical response, this is the reason why you will feel a sudden need to urinate. Just as shortness of breath is a way of life with COPD, eventually so is incontinence. If you have mild COPD you may experience light/infrequent incontinence, from every day thing not just being short of breath. Things like laughing, sneezing, coughing, climbing stairs, and other physical activity, but, you may be able to prevent it from happening. If you are or have had a problem with incontinence, you might want to talk to your doctor about it.