will you explain an ostomy?
Sure! It’s a new thing for me and I’m still learning but basically - specifically with my procedure - they disconnected my descending colon from my rectum because I had a tear in it (put there by a minor procedure laprosopically, something that could have been avoided). Because of the tear in the rectum, passing stool that way caused a lot of it to leak into the rest of my body, which, if you didn’t know, is really really bad. It lead to a horrible infection, I became septic, and basically life was hell.
Anyways, back to the ostomy. After disconnecting it (this is where I have no idea what the proper medical terms are and I could be kind of wrong here) they basically do some magic and push it to the outside of my body. That way, I shit out my stomach instead of out my ass, into the ostomy bag. The thing that actually passes the stool is a stoma. It’s red, it doesn’t have nerve endings, and I thought it was a mini red bunt cake the first time I looked at it (I was on some pretty heavy medication though, and had some pretty weird hallucinations).
It takes a lot to get used to and, because there’s such a stigma against them, it’s a battle to accept it. However, I am able to get it reversed in the next 4-6 months (they’ll reattach everything laproscopically), so this isn’t a long term thing for me like it is for countless of other people.
